■
GENOCIDE
Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction is the most wide-ranging textbook on geno-
cide yet published. The book is designed as a text for upper-undergraduate and
graduate students, as well as a primer for non-specialists and general readers interested
in learning about one of humanity’s enduring blights.
Over the course of sixteen chapters, genocide scholar Adam Jones:
• Provides an introduction to genocide as both a historical phenomenon and an
analytical-legal concept.
• Discusses the role of imperalism, war, and social revolution in fueling genocide.
• Supplies no fewer than seven full-length case studies of genocides worldwide, each
with an accompanying box-text.
• Explores perspectives on genocide from the social sciences, including psychology,
sociology, anthropology, political science/international relations, and gender
studies.
• Considers “The Future of Genocide,” with attention to historical memory and
genocide denial; initiatives for truth, justice, and redress; and strategies of
intervention and prevention.
Written in clear and lively prose, liberally sprinkled with illustrations and personal
testimonies from genocide survivors, Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction is
destined to become a core text of the new generation of genocide scholarship. An
accompanying website (www.genocidetext.net) features a broad selection of
supplementary materials, teaching aids, and Internet resources.
Adam Jones, Ph.D. is currently Associate Research Fellow in the Genocide Studies
Program at Yale University. His recent publications include the edited volumes
Gendercide and Genocide (2004) and Genocide, War Crimes and the West: History and
Complicity (2004). He is co-founder and executive director of Gendercide Watch
(www.gendercide.org).
GENOCIDE
A Comprehensive Introduction
Adam Jones
First published 2006
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2006 Adam Jones
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Jones, Adam, 1963–
Genocide : a comprehensive introduction / Adam Jones.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0–415–35384–X (pbk. : alk. paper) – ISBN 0–415–35385–8 (hardback : alk. paper)
1. Genocide. 2. Genocide–Case studies. I. Title.
HV6322.7.J64 2006
304.6’63–dc22
2005030424
ISBN10: 0–415–35385–8 ISBN13: 978–0–415–35385–4 (hbk)
ISBN10: 0–415–35384–X ISBN13: 978–0–415–35384–7 (pbk)
ISBN10: 0–203–34744–7 ISBN13: 978–0–203–34744–7 (ebk)
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2006.
“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s
collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”
For Jo and David Jones, givers of life,
and for Dr. Griselda Ramírez Reyes, saver of lives.
So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late.
Bob Dylan, “All Along the Watchtower”
■
CONTENTS
List of illustrations xiii
About the author xv
Introduction xviii
PART 1 OVERVIEW 1
1 The Origins of Genocide 3
Genocide in prehistory, antiquity, and early modernity 3
The Vendée uprising 6
Zulu genocide 7
Naming genocide: Raphael Lemkin 8
Defining genocide: The UN Convention 12
Bounding genocide: Comparative genocide studies 14
Discussion 19
Personal observations 22
Contested cases 23
Atlantic slavery 23
Area bombing and nuclear warfare 24
UN sanctions against Iraq 25
9/11 26
Structural and institutional violence 27
Is genocide ever justified? 28
Suggestions for further study 31
Notes 32
2 Imperialism, War, and Social Revolution 39
Imperialism and colonialism 39
Colonial and imperial genocides 40
Imperial famines 41
The Congo “rubber terror” 42
The Japanese in East and Southeast Asia 44
The US in Indochina 46
vii
The Soviets in Afghanistan 47
A note on genocide and imperial dissolution 48
Genocide and war 48
The First World War and the dawn of industrial death 51
The Second World War and the “barbarization of warfare” 53
Genocide and social revolution 55
The nuclear revolution and “omnicide” 56
Suggestions for further study 59
Notes 60
PART 2 CASES 65
3 Genocides of Indigenous Peoples 67
Introduction 67
Colonialism and the discourse of extinction 68
The conquest of the Americas 70
Spanish America 70
The United States and Canada 72
Other genocidal strategies 75
A contemporary case: The Maya of Guatemala 77
Australia’s Aborigines and the Namibian Herero 78
Genocide in Australia 78
The Herero genocide 80
Denying genocide, celebrating genocide 81
Complexities and caveats 83
Indigenous revival 85
Suggestions for further study 87
Notes 89
4 The Armenian Genocide 101
Introduction 101
Origins of the genocide 102
War, massacre, and deportation 105
The course of the Armenian genocide 106
The aftermath 112
The denial 113
Suggestions for further study 115
Notes 116
5 Stalin’s Terror 124
The Bolsheviks seize power 125
Collectivization and famine 127
The Gulag 128
CONTENTS
viii
The Great Purge of 1937–38 129
The war years 131
The destruction of national minorities 134
Stalin and genocide 135
Suggestions for further study 137
Notes 138
6 The Jewish Holocaust 147
Introduction 147
Origins 148
“Ordinary Germans” and the Nazis 150
The turn to mass murder 151
Debating the Holocaust 157
Intentionalists vs. functionalists 157
Jewish resistance 158
The Allies and the churches: Could the Jews have been saved? 159
Willing executioners? 160
Israel and the Jewish Holocaust 161
Is the Jewish Holocaust “uniquely unique”? 162
Suggestions for further study 163
Notes 165
7 Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge 185
Origins of the Khmer Rouge 185
War and revolution, 1970–75 188
A genocidal ideology 190
A policy of “urbicide”, 1975 192
“Base people” vs. “new people” 194
Cambodia’s holocaust, 1975–79 195
Genocide against Buddhists and ethnic minorities 199
Aftermath: Politics and the quest for justice 200
Suggestions for further study 202
Notes 202
8 Bosnia and Kosovo 212
Origins and onset 212
Gendercide and genocide in Bosnia 216
The international dimension 219
Kosovo, 1998–99 220
Aftermaths 222
Suggestions for further study 224
Notes 224
CONTENTS
ix
9 Holocaust in Rwanda 232
Introduction: Horror and shame 232
Background to genocide 233
Genocidal frenzy 238
Aftermath 245
Suggestions for further study 246
Notes 247
PART 3 SOCIAL SCIENCE PERSPECTIVES 259
10 Psychological Perspectives 261
Narcissism, greed, and fear 262
Narcissism 262
Greed 264
Fear 265
Genocide and humiliation 268
The psychology of perpetrators 270
The Zimbardo experiments 274
The psychology of rescuers 275
Suggestions for further study 281
Notes 282
11 The Sociology and Anthropology of Genocide 288
Introduction 288
Sociological perspectives 289
The sociology of modernity 289
Ethnicity and ethnic conflict 291
Ethnic conflict and violence “specialists” 293
“Middleman minorities” 294
Anthropological perspectives 296
Suggestions for further study 301
Notes 302
12 Political Science and International Relations 307
Empirical investigations 307
The changing face of war 311
Democracy, war, and genocide/democide 314
Norms and prohibition regimes 316
Suggestions for further study 320
Notes 321
CONTENTS
x
13 Gendering Genocide 325
Gendercide vs. root-and-branch genocide 326
Women and genocide 329
Gendercidal institutions 330
Genocide and violence against homosexuals 331
Are men more genocidal than women? 332
A note on gendered propaganda 334
Suggestions for further study 336
Notes 337
PART 4 THE FUTURE OF GENOCIDE 343
14 Memory, Forgetting, and Denial 345
The struggle over historical memory 345
Germany and “the search for a usable past” 349
The politics of forgetting 350
Genocide denial: Motives and strategies 351
Denial and free speech 354
Suggestions for further study 358
Notes 358
15 Justice, Truth, and Redress 362
Leipzig, Constantinople, Nuremberg, Tokyo 363
The international criminal tribunals: Yugoslavia and Rwanda 366
Jurisdictional issues 367
The concept of a victim group 367
Gender and genocide 367
National trials 368
The “mixed tribunals”: Cambodia and Sierra Leone 370
Another kind of justice: Rwanda’s gacaca experiment 370
The Pinochet case 371
The International Criminal Court (ICC) 373
International citizens’ tribunals 375
Truth and reconciliation 377
The challenge of redress 379
Suggestions for further study 381
Notes 382
16 Strategies of Intervention and Prevention 388
Warning signs 389
Humanitarian intervention 392
CONTENTS
xi
■
ILLUSTRATIONS
1.1 Raphael Lemkin 10
2.1 Imperial genocide: Belgian King Leopold and the Congo 43
2.2 British soldiers go “over the top” at the Battle of the Somme, 1916 52
2.3 Atomic bomb explosion at Nagasaki, 1945 57
3.1 The Cerro Rico silver-mines in Potosí, Bolivia 72
3.2 Loading Indian corpses from the Wounded Knee massacre, 1890 74
3.3 Mural of indigenous revival in Yucatán, Mexico 87
4.1 Armenian men being deported from Harput for mass killing, May 1915 107
4.2 Armenian refugees, 1915 108
5.1 A supporter of Stalin and Lenin carries their portraits in Red Square 136
6.1 Ruins of a gas chamber and crematorium complex at Auschwitz-Birkenau 153
6.2 Mass burial of corpses at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, 1945 154
6a.1 A Soviet prisoner-of-war is dispatched “to the rear” 176
7.1 Photos of Cambodians incarcerated and killed at Tuol Sleng prison, Phnom Penh 200
8.1 Mass grave at Pilice, near Srebrenica 217
9.1 Tutsi women murdered in the Rwandan genocide of 1994 240
10.1 Core structure of the Milgram experiments 272
10.2 Per Anger with a portrait of Raoul Wallenberg 277
10.3 Pass issued to Lili Katz by the Swedish legation in Budapest, 1944 277
11.1 Forensic anthropologist Clyde Snow 300
12.1 Political scientist R.J. Rummel 308
12.2 Demobilized child soldiers in the Democratic Republic of Congo, 2002 312
13.1 Nazi propaganda poster vilifying Jewish men 335
13.2 Tutsi women depicted seducing UN force commander General Roméo Dallaire 335
14.1 The Naval Mechanics School in the Buenos Aires suburb of Palermo 347
15.1 Judgment at Nuremberg, 1946 365
15.2 Luis Moreno Ocampo, the first prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) 374
■
MAPS
World map xvi–xvii
5a.1 Chechnya 142
7.1 Cambodia 187
xiii
7a.1 East Timor 207
8.1 Bosnia 214
8a.1 Bangladesh 228
9.1 Rwanda 235
9a.1 Congo 251
9a.2 Darfur 253
■
BOXES
1.1 Genocide: scholarly definitions 15
3a Tibet under Chinese rule 94
4.1 One woman’s story: Vergeen 109
4a The Anfal Campaign against Iraqi Kurds, 1988 119
5.1 One man’s story: Janusz Bardach 131
5a Chechnya 141
6.1 One woman’s story: Nechama Epstein 155
6a The Nazis’ other victims 168
7.1 One girl’s story: Loung Ung 196
7a East Timor 206
8.1 One man’s story: Nezad Avdic 218
8a Genocide in Bangladesh, 1971 227
9.1 One woman’s story: Gloriose Mukakanimba 240
9a Congo and Darfur 250
ILLUSTRATIONS
xiv
■
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Adam Jones was born in Singapore in 1963, and grew up in England and Canada. He is currently
Associate Research Fellow in the Genocide Studies Program at Yale University. He holds an MA from
McGill University and a Ph.D. from the University of British Columbia, both in political science. He
has edited two volumes on genocide: Gendercide and Genocide (Vanderbilt University Press, 2004) and
Genocide, War Crimes and the West: History and Complicity (Zed Books, 2004). He has also published
two books on the media and political transition. His scholarly articles have appeared in Review of
International Studies, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Journal of Genocide Research, Journal of Human Rights,
and other publications. He is co-founder and executive director of Gendercide Watch (www.gendercide.
org), a Web-based educational initiative that confronts gender-selective atrocities worldwide. Jones has
lived and traveled in over sixty countries on every populated continent. His freelance journalism and
travel photography, along with a selection of scholarly writings, are available at http://adamjones.
freeservers.com. Email: [email protected].
xv
Canada
(Ch. 3)
United States
(Chs. 1, 2, 3, 12)
Guatemala
(Ch. 3)
Haiti
(Ch. 1)
Dominican
Republic
(Ch. 3)
Peru
(Ch. 3)
Bolivia
(Ch. 3)
Argentina
(Ch. 14)
Chile
(Ch. 15)
Brazil
(Ch. 1)
Sierra Leone
(Ch. 15)
France
(Ch. 1)
Germany
(Chs. 1, 2, 3, 6, 10, 11, 13,
14, 15, 16, Box text 6a)
Mexico (Ch. 3)
World Map Cases of genocide and mass conflict referenced in this book
Source: Chartwell Illustrators
Rwanda
(Chs. 9, 10, 11, 13, 15)
Burundi
(Ch. 9)
Darfur
(Box text 9a)
Congo
(Ch. 2, Box text 9a)
Namibia
(Ch. 3)
Poland
(Ch. 6, Box text 6a)
Russia/former Soviet Union
(Chs. 2, 5, 16, Box texts 5a, 6a)
Chechnya
(Box text 5a)
Ukraine
(Ch. 5, Box text 6a)
Bosnia and Herzegovina
(Chs. 8, 13, 14, 15)
Croatia
(Chs. 1, 8)
Yugoslavia/Serbia
(Chs. 8, 13, 14, 15)
Kosovo
(Chs. 8, 16)
Turkey
(Chs. 4, 10,
11, 14, 15)
Iraq
(Ch. 1, Box
text 4a)
Kurdish region
of Iraq
(Box text 5a)
Kazakhstan
(Ch. 5)
China
(Chs. 2, 3, Box text 3a)
Tibet
(Box text 3a)
Japan
(Chs. 1, 2, 13, 15)
India
(Chs. 2, 13)
Bangladesh
(Box text 8a)
Pakistan
(Box text 8a)
Afghanistan
(Ch. 2)
Cambodia
(Chs. 7, 15)
Vietnam
(Ch. 2)
East Timor
(Box text 7a)
Australia
(Chs. 3, 15)
New Zealand
(Ch. 15)
1
2
3
4
1
2
3
4
Introduction
■
WHY STUDY GENOCIDE?
“Why would you want to study that?”
If you spend any time seriously investigating genocide, or even if you only leave
this book lying in plain view, it is likely you will have to deal with this question.
Underlying it is a tone of distaste and skepticism, perhaps tinged with suspicion.
There may be a hint that you are guided by a morbid fixation on the worst of human
horrors. How will you respond? Why, indeed, study genocide?
First and foremost, if you are concerned about issues such as peace, human
rights, and social justice, there is a sense that with genocide you are confronting the
“Big One,” what Joseph Conrad called the “heart of darkness.” That can be deeply
intimidating and disturbing. It can even make you feel trivial and powerless. But
genocide is the opposite of trivial. Whatever energy and commitment you invest in
understanding genocide will be directed towards comprehending and confronting
one of humanity’s greatest scourges.
Second, intellectually, to study genocide is to study our historical inheritance.
It is unfortunately the case that all stages of recorded human existence, and nearly
all parts of the world, have known genocide at one time or another, often repeatedly.
Furthermore, genocide may be as prevalent in the contemporary era as at any time
in history. Inevitably, there is something depressing about this: Will humanity ever
change? But there is also interest and personal enlightenment to be gained by delving
into the historical record, for which genocide serves as a point of entry. I well
remember the period, half a decade ago, that I devoted to voracious reading of the
genocide studies literature, and exploring the diverse themes this opened up to me.
xviii
For the first time, events as varied as the European witch-hunts, the War of the Triple
Alliance in South America (1864–70), the independence struggle in East
Pakistan/Bangladesh, the global plagues of maternal mortality and forced labor – all
were revealed to my bleary eyes. (I was researching case-studies for the Gendercide
Watch website (www.gendercide.org), which explains the eclectic choice of subject
matter.) The accounts were grim – sometimes relentlessly so. But they were also
spellbinding, and they gave me a better grounding not only in world history, but
also in sociology, psychology, anthropology, and a handful of other disciplines.
This raises a third reason to study genocide: it brings you into contact with some
of the most interesting and exciting debates in the social sciences and humanities.
To what extent should genocide be understood as reflecting epic social transfor-
mations such as modernity, the rise of the state, and globalization? How has warfare
been transformed in recent times, and how are the “degenerate” and decentralized
wars of the present age linked to genocidal outbreaks? How does gender shape
genocidal experiences and genocidal strategies? How is history “produced,” and what
role do memories or denial of genocide play in that production? These are only a
few of the themes to be examined in this book. I hope they will lead readers, as they
have led me, towards an engagement with cutting-edge debates that have a wider,
though not necessarily deeper, significance.
In writing this book, I am standing on the shoulders of giants: the genocide
scholars without whose trail-blazing efforts my own work would be inconceivable.
You may find their approach and humanity inspiring, as I do. One of my principal
concerns is to provide an overview of the core literature in genocide studies; thus
each chapter and box-text is accompanied by recommendations for further study.
Modern academic writing, particularly in the social sciences and humanities, is
often riddled with impenetrable jargon and not a little pomposity. It would be
pleasant to be able to report that genocide studies is free of such baggage. It isn’t; but
it is less burdened by it than most other fields of study. It seems this has to do with
the experience of looking into the abyss, and finding that the abyss looks back. One
is forced to ponder one’s own human frailty and vulnerability; one is even pressed
to confront one’s own capacity for hating others, for marginalizing them, for
supporting their oppression and annihilation. These realizations aren’t pretty, but they
are arguably necessary. And they can lead to a certain humility – a rare quality indeed
in academia. I once described to a friend why the Danish philosopher Søren
Kierkegaard (1813–55) moved me so deeply: “It’s like he’s grabbing you by the arm
and saying, ‘Look. We don’t have much time. There are important things we need
to talk about.’” You sense the same reading much of the genocide-studies literature:
that the issues are too vital, and time too limited, to beat around the bush. George
Orwell famously described political speech – he could have been referring to some
academic writing – as “a mass of words [that] falls upon the facts like soft snow,
blurring the outlines and covering up all the details.”
1
By contrast, the majority of
genocide scholars inhabit the literary equivalent of the Tropics. I hope to take up
residence there too.
Finally, some good news for the reader interested in understanding and con-
fronting genocide: your studies and actions may make a difference. To study genocide
is to study processes by which hundreds of millions of people met brutal ends. But
INTRODUCTION
xix
there are many, many people throughout history who have bravely resisted the
blind rush to hatred. They are the courageous and decent souls who gave refuge to
hunted Jews or desperate Tutsis. They are the religious believers of many faiths who
struggled against the tide of evil, and spread instead a message of love, tolerance, and
commonality. They are the non-governmental organizations that warned against
incipient genocides and carefully documented those they were unable to prevent.
They are the leaders and common soldiers – American, British, Soviet, Vietnamese,
Indian, Tanzanian, Rwandan, and others – who vanquished genocidal regimes in
modern times.
2
And yes, they are the scholars and intellectuals who have honed our
understanding of genocide, while at the same time working outside the ivory tower
to alleviate it. You will meet some of these individuals in this book. I hope their stories
and actions will inspire you to believe that a future free of genocide and other crimes
against humanity is possible.
But ...
Studying genocide, and trying to prevent it, is not to be entered into lightly.
A theme that has not been systematically addressed in the genocide studies literature
is the psychological and emotional impact such studies can have on the investigator.
How many genocide students, scholars, and activists suffer, as do their counterparts
in the human rights and social work fields?
3
How many experience depression,
insomnia, nightmares as a result of immersing themselves in the most atrocious
human conduct?
The trauma is especially intense for those who have actually witnessed genocide,
or its direct consequences, up close. During the Turkish genocide against Armenians
(Chapter 4), the US Ambassador to Constantinople, Henry Morgenthau, received
a stream of American missionaries who had managed to make their way out of the
killing zone. “For hours they would sit in my office with tears streaming down their
faces,” Morgenthau recalled; many had been “broken in health” by the atrocities they
had witnessed.
4
My friend Christian Scherrer, who works at the Hiroshima Peace
Institute, arrived in Rwanda in November 1994 as part of a United Nations
investigation team, only a few months after the slaughter of a million people had been
terminated by forces of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) (see Chapter 9). Rotting
bodies were still strewn across the landscape. “For weeks,” Scherrer writes,
following directions given by witnesses, I carefully made my way, step by step, over
farmland and grassland. Under my feet, often only half covered with earth, lay
the remains of hundreds, indeed thousands, of unfortunate individuals betrayed
by their neighbors and slaughtered by specially enlisted bands of assassins . . . a
state-sponsored mass murder...carried out with a level of mass participation by
the majority population the like of which had never been seen before....Many
of those who came from outside shared the experience of hundreds of thousands
of Rwandans of continuing, for months on end, or even longer, to grieve, to weep
internally, and, night after night, to be unable to sleep longer than an hour or
two. When they returned to Europe, many of my colleagues felt paralyzed.
He describes the experience as “one of the most painful processes I have ever been
through,” and the writing of his fine book, Genocide and Crisis, as “part of a personal
INTRODUCTION
xx
process of grieving.” “Investigation into genocide,” he adds, “is something that
remains with one for life.”
5
Even as a latecomer to the Rwandan genocide – and as
someone who has never visited the country – I remember being so shaken by reading
a massive, agonizingly detailed human rights report on the genocide
6
that I dreamed
about Rwanda for many nights, feverish visions of encountering Hutu roadblocks,
of smuggling desperate Tutsis to Burundi. . . .
Now that interest in genocide is growing exponentially, and the field of
comparative genocide studies along with it, this may be a good time to undertake a
survey (say, of members of the International Association of Genocide Scholars) to
ascertain how common such symptoms are among those who devote their lives to
the theme. Meanwhile, I encourage you – especially if you are just beginning your
exploration – to be attentive to signs of personal stress. Talk about it with your fellow
students, your colleagues, or family and friends. Dwell on the positive examples of
bravery and love for others that the study of genocide regularly provides. If that doesn’t
work, seek counseling through the resources available on your campus or in your
community.
■
WHAT THIS BOOK TRIES TO DO, AND WHY
I see genocide as inseparable from the broad thrust of history, both ancient
and modern – indeed, it is among history’s defining features, overlapping a range of
central historical processes: war, imperialism, state-building, class struggle. I perceive
it as intimately linked to key institutions, in which state or broadly political
authorities are often but not always principal actors: forced labor, military conscrip-
tion, incarceration, female infanticide.
I adopt a comparative approach that does not elevate particular genocides over
others, except to the extent that scale and intensity warrant special attention. Virtually
all definable human groups – the ethnic, national, racial, and religious ones that
anchor the legal definition of genocide, and others besides – have been victims of
genocide in the past,
7
and are vulnerable in specific contexts today. Equally, most
human collectivities – even vulnerable and oppressed ones – have proved capable of
inflicting genocide. This can be a painful acknowledgment for genocide scholars to
make, and for that reason it is routinely avoided. But it will be confronted head-on
throughout this volume: there are no sacred cows here. Respect for taboos and tender
sensibilities takes a back seat to the imperative to get to grips with genocide –to
confront it in as clear-eyed a way as possible; to reduce the chances that mystification
and wishful thinking will cloud recognition, and thereby blunt effective opposition.
The subject of genocide has never been more prominent in the public and
academic debate than it is today. As one indication, consider the awarding of both the
Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award to Samantha Power for her 2002 work,
“A Problem From Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide, which criticized Western
passivity in the face of genocide.
8
Power’s book rapidly became a nucleus around
which a mainstream interest in genocide could coalesce.
“A Problem from Hell” was as much culmination as catalyst, however. The field of
comparative genocide studies has been developing for almost six decades. But it
INTRODUCTION
xxi
languished between the 1940s, when Raphael Lemkin coined the term “genocide”
and the UN Convention was propounded, and the early 1980s, when Leo Kuper
published his field-defining contribution, Genocide: Its Political Use in the Twentieth
Century (1981).
9
In the late 1980s and the 1990s, the field blossomed, with the
formation of the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) in 1994, and
the publication of dozens of monographs and comparative studies – thousands, if
we include the literature focused on the Jewish catastrophe under Nazism.
Despite this proliferation, comparative genocide studies arguably has yet to find
its introductory textbook. Some important edited volumes have come closest to
establishing themselves as core texts (notably Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn’s
History and Sociology of Genocide, and Samuel Totten et al.’s Century of Genocide:
Eyewitness Accounts and Critical Views).
10
As a single-authored work, the classic in
the field probably remains Kuper’s Genocide; but it is now well over two decades old,
and its author sadly deceased. Meanwhile, two fine encyclopedias and a couple of
specialized bibliographies have been published, but these are costly and unwieldy for
the student or general reader.
Excellent and accessible books on genocide have been published in recent years,
though the large majority adopt a specific disciplinary perspective. A partial exception
is probably the best of these texts, Alex Alvarez’s Governments, Citizens, and Genocide,
which approaches the subject from the angle of both political science and sociology.
11
Various scholars have explored psychological perspectives, including Roy Baumeister,
Ervin Staub, and James Waller.
12
Martin Shaw has added an important volume on
War and Genocide, from an international relations and conflict studies framework.
13
Meanwhile, highly stimulating work has begun to emanate from the discipline of
anthropology. Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Beatriz Manz, among others, have done
important work on genocide and crimes against humanity. Their work has been
bolstered by two anthologies of anthropological studies edited by Alexander Laban
Hinton.
14
Last but not least, a rich body of case studies and comparative-theoretical material
has accumulated – one this book leans on heavily, with appropriate citation. Thus it
now seems an opportune moment to offer a comprehensive introductory text: one
that samples the wealth of thinking and writing on genocide in an interdisciplinary
way, with a broad range of case studies, and with a unified authorial voice.
The first part of Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction seeks to ground readers
in the basic historical and conceptual contexts of genocide. It explores the process
by which the Polish-Jewish jurist Raphael Lemkin first named and defined the
phenomenon, then mobilized a nascent United Nations to outlaw it. His story
constitutes a vivid and inspiring portrait of an individual who had a significant, largely
unsung impact on modern history. Examination of legal and scholarly definitions and
debates may help readers to clarify their own thinking, and situate themselves in the
discussion.
The case study section of the book (Part 2) is divided between longer case studies
of genocide and capsule studies that complement the detailed treatments. I hope this
structure will be conducive to discussion and comparative analysis.
The first three chapters of Part 3 explore social-scientific contributions to the
study of genocide – from psychology, sociology, anthropology, and political science/
INTRODUCTION
xxii
international relations. Let me indicate the ambit and limitations of this analysis.
I am a political scientist by training. As well as devoting a chapter to perspectives from
this discipline, I incorporate its insights elsewhere in the text (notably in Chapter 2
on “Imperialism, War, and Social Revolution,” and Chapter 16 on “Strategies of
Intervention and Prevention”). Likewise, Chapter 14 on “Memory, Forgetting, and
Denial” touches on a significant discussion among professional historians, while the
analysis of “Justice, Truth, and Redress” (Chapter 15), as well as parts of Chapter 1
on “The Origins of Genocide,” explore relevant developments and debates in inter-
national law.
Even if a synoptic examination of these disciplines’ insights were possible, given
space limitations, I would be unable to provide it. The massive proliferation of
academic production, of schools and subschools, has effectively obliterated the
“renaissance” man or woman, who once moved with facility among varied fields of
knowledge. Accordingly, throughout these chapters, my ambition is modest. I seek
only to introduce readers to some useful scholarly framings, together with insights
that I have found especially relevant and simulating.
This book at least engages with a field – genocide studies – that has been
profoundly interdisciplinary from the start. The development of strict disciplinary
boundaries is a modern invention, reflecting the growing scale and bureaucra-
tization of the university. In many ways, the barriers it establishes among disciplines
are artificial. Political scientists draw on insights from history, sociology, and
psychology, and their own work finds readers in those disciplines. Sociology and
anthropology are closely related: the former developed as a study of the societies of
the industrial West, while in the latter, Westerners studied “primitive” or preindustrial
societies. Other linkages and points of interpenetration could be cited. The point
is that consideration of a given theme under the rubric of a particular discipline
may be arbitrary. To take just one example, “ethnicity” can be approached from
sociological, anthropological, psychological, and political science perspectives. I
discuss it principally in its sociological context, but would not wish to see it fixed
there.
Part 4, “The Future of Genocide,” adopts a more forward-looking approach,
seeking to familiarize readers with contemporary debates over historical memory and
genocide denial, as well as mechanisms of justice and redress. The final chapter,
“Strategies of Intervention and Prevention,” allows readers to evaluate options for
suppressing the scourge.
“How does one handle this subject?” wrote Terrence Des Pres in the preface to
The Survivor, his study of life in the Nazi concentration camps. His answer: “One
doesn’t; not well, not finally. No degree of scope or care can equal the enormity of
such events or suffice for the sorrow they encompass. Not to betray it is as much as
I can hope for.”
15
His words resonate. In my heart, I know this book is an audacious
enterprise, but I have tried to expand the limits of my empathy and, through wide
reading, my interdisciplinary understanding. I have also benefited from the insights
and corrections of other scholars and general readers, whose names appear in the
acknowledgments.
While I must depict particular genocides (and the contributions of entire aca-
demic disciplines) in very broad strokes, I have tried throughout to find room for
INTRODUCTION
xxiii
individuals, whether as victims, perpetrators, or rescuers. I hope this serves to counter
some of the abstraction and depersonalization that is inevitable in a general survey.
A list of relevant internet sources, and a filmography-in-progress, may be found on
the Web page for this book at http://www.genocidetext.net.
16
■
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction was born over a lively dinner in Durban,
South Africa, at which I chanced to sit at the elbow of Taylor & Francis commis-
sioning editor Craig Fowlie. I understand that one of Craig’s tasks is to travel the
world marshalling promising-sounding book proposals. Not bad work if you can get
it. I am truly grateful for Craig’s early and enduring support. Thanks also to Nadia
Seemungul and Steve Thompson, and to Ann King for her sterling copy-editing.
Colleagues and administrators at the CIDE research institute in Mexico City
either encouraged my study of genocide or sought to divert me from it. I gained from
the positive and negative inspiration alike. For the former, thanks to Jorge Chabat,
Farid Kahhat, Jean Meyer, Susan Minushkin, and Jesús Velasco. The bulk of this book
was written while on contract as a project researcher at CIDE in 2004. My research
assistant, Pamela Huerta, compiled comprehensive briefs for the Cambodia case study
and the Tibet and Congo/Darfur box texts. Pamela, your skill and enthusiasm were
greatly appreciated.
Much of Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction was written during travels in
late 2004 through Córdoba province in central Argentina, and in vibrant Buenos
Aires. My thanks to the Argentine friends who welcomed me, especially Julieta Ayala;
to the hoteliers and apartment agents who put me up along the way, notably Jorge
Rodríguez; and the restaurant staff who kept me fueled with that awesome steak and
vino tinto.
The manuscript was completed in the Mexico City home of Jessica and Esperanza
Rodríguez; my warm thanks to both. In Puebla, Fabiola Martínez asked probing
questions, engaged in stimulating discussions, and supplied me with tender care
besides. Gracias, mi Fabi-losa. What one could call “post-production” took place at
Yale University, where I was fortunate to obtain a two-year postdoctoral fellowship
in the Genocide Studies Program for 2005–07. I will use this time to research a book
on genocide and communication. I am honored by the opportunity to conduct
research at one of the world’s leading universities. I am especially grateful to Ben
Kiernan, eminent Cambodia scholar and director of the Genocide Studies Program,
for his interest in my work and support of it over the past few years. Thanks also to
the Yale Center for International and Area Studies (YCIAS); its director Ian Shapiro;
and associate director Richard Kane.
Kenneth J. Campbell, Jo and David Jones, René Lemarchand, Benjamin Madley,
and Nicholas Robins generously read the entire manuscript. I benefited hugely from
their feedback. Jo and David’s meticulous proofreading of the typescript might have
landed them in the dedication to this volume even if they weren’t my parents. As for
Ben Madley, our weekly or biweekly lunches at Yale, when we went through his
insightful comments on individual chapters, were simply the most stimulating and
INTRODUCTION
xxiv
thought-provoking discussions I have ever had about genocide. As with Jo and David,
there are few pages of this book that do not bear Ben’s stamp.
Other scholars, professionals, and general readers who read and commented
upon various chapters include: Jennifer Archer, Peter Balakian, Donald Bloxham,
Peter Burns, Thea Halo, Alex Hinton, Kal Holsti, Craig Jones, Ben Kiernan, Mark
Levene, Evelin Lindner, Linda Melvern, Kathleen Morrow, A. Dirk Moses, Margaret
Power, Victoria Sanford, and Christian Scherrer. I also acknowledge the insights and
recommendations of two anonymous reviewers of the book proposal for Routledge.
Although I have not always heeded these individuals’ suggestions, their perspectives
have been absolutely crucial, and have rescued me from numerous mistakes and
misinterpretations. I accept full responsibility for the errors and oversights that
remain.
Friends and family have always buttressed me, and stoked my passion for studying
history and humanity. This book could not have been written without the nurture
and guidance provided by my parents and my brother, Craig. Warmest thanks also
to Atenea Acevedo, Carla Bergman, David Buchanan, Charli Carpenter, Mike
Charko, Ferrel Christensen, Terry and Meghan Evenson, Jay Forster, Andrea and
Steve Gunner, Henry Huttenbach, Luz María Johnson, David Liebe, John
Margesson, Eric Markusen, Peter Prontzos, Hamish Telford, and Miriam Tratt.
Dr. Griselda Ramírez Reyes shares the dedication of this work. Griselda is a
pediatric neurosurgeon in Mexico City. I have stood literally at her elbow as she
opened the head of a three-week-old girl, and extracted a cancerous tumour seemingly
half the size of the infant’s brain. I hope to open a few minds myself with this work,
but I would not pretend the task compares.
Adam Jones
New Haven, USA, March 2006
■
NOTES
1 George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language” (1946), in Inside the Whale and Other
Essays (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974). Available on the Web at http://www.resort.
com/~prime8/Orwell/patee.html.
2 The Second World War Allies against the Nazis and Japanese; Tanzanians against Idi
Amin’s Uganda; Vietnamese in Cambodia in 1979; Indians in Bangladesh in 1971;
soldiers of the Rwandan Patriotic Front in 1994. See also Chapter 16.
3 Writing the first in-depth study of the Soviet “terror-famine” in Ukraine in 1932–33 (see
Chapter 5), Robert Conquest confronted only indirectly the “inhuman, unimaginable
misery” of the famine; but he still found the task “so distressing that [I] sometimes hardly
felt able to proceed.” Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the
Terror-Famine (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 10. Donald Miller and
Lorna Touryan Miller, who interviewed a hundred survivors of the Armenian genocide,
wrote: “During this project our emotions have ranged from melancholy to anger, from
feeling guilty about our own privileged status to being overwhelmed by the continuing
suffering in our world.” They described experiencing “a permanent loss of innocence
about the human capacity for evil,” as well as “a recognition of the need to combat such
evil.” Miller and Miller, Survivors: An Oral History of the Armenian Genocide (Berkeley,
INTRODUCTION
xxv
CA: University of California Press, 1999), p. 4. After an immersion in the archive of S-
21 (Tuol Sleng), the Khmer Rouge killing center in Cambodia, David Chandler found
that “the terror lurking inside it has pushed me around, blunted my skills, and eroded
my self-assurance. The experience at times has been akin to drowning.” Chandler, Voices
from S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot’s Secret Prison (Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 1999), p. 145. Brandon Hamber notes that “many of the staff” working
with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa have experienced
“nightmares, paranoia, emotional bluntness, physical problems (e.g. headaches, ulcers,
exhaustion, etc.), high levels of anxiety, irritability and aggression, relationship difficulties
and substance abuse related problems.” Hamber, “The Burdens of Truth,” in David E.
Lorey and William H. Beezley, eds, Genocide, Collective Violence, and Popular Memory:
The Politics of Remembrance in the Twentieth Century (Wilmington, DL: Scholarly
Resources, Inc., 2002), p. 96.
4 Peter Balakian, The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response (New
York: HarperCollins, 2003), p. 278.
5 Christian P. Scherrer, Genocide and Crisis in Central Africa: Conflict Roots, Mass Violence,
and Regional War (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002), pp. 1, 7.
6 African Rights, Rwanda: Death, Despair and Defiance, rev. edn (London: African Rights,
1995). The reader who manages to make it through the 300-page chapter titled “A Policy
of Massacres” is then confronted with another 300-page chapter titled “Genocidal
Frenzy.”
7 “Genocide has been practiced throughout most of history in all parts of the world,
although it did not attract much attention because genocide was usually accepted as the
deserved fate of the vanquished.” Kurt Jonassohn with Karin Solveig Björnson, Genocide
and Gross Human Rights Violations in Comparative Perspective (New Brunswick, NJ:
Transaction Publishers, 1998), p. 50.
8 Samantha Power, “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide (New York:
Basic Books, 2002).
9 Leo Kuper, Genocide: Its Political Use in the Twentieth Century (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1981).
10 Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn, The History and Sociology of Genocide: Analyses and Case
Studies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990); Samuel Totten, William S.
Parsons and Israel Charny, eds, Century of Genocide: Eyewitness Accounts and Critical
Views (New York: Routledge, 2004) (2nd edn).
11 Alex Alvarez, Governments, Citizens, and Genocide: A Comparative and Interdisciplinary
Approach (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2001).
12 Roy F. Baumeister, Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty (New York: W.H. Freeman,
1999); James Waller, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass
Killing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Ervin Staub, Roots of Evil: The Origins
of Genocide and Other Group Violence (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
13 Martin Shaw, War and Genocide: Organized Killing in Modern Society (Cambridge: Polity
Press, 2003).
14 Alexander Laban Hinton, ed., Genocide: An Anthropological Reader (Oxford: Blackwell
Publishers, 2002); Alexander Laban Hinton, ed., Annihilating Difference: The
Anthropology of Genocide (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002).
15 Terrence Des Pres, The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1976), pp. v–vi.
16 Readers who are interested in the background to my engagement with genocide studies
can consult the short essay, “Genocide: A Personal Journey,” at http://www.genocidetext.
net/personal_journey.htm.
INTRODUCTION
xxvi
PART ONE OVERVIEW
■
The Origins of Genocide
This chapter analyzes the origins of genocide as a global-historical phenomenon,
providing a sense, however fragmentary, of genocide’s frequency through history.
It then turns to examine the origin and evolution of the concept itself, and explore
some “contested cases” that test the boundaries of the genocide framework. No
chapter in the book tries to cover so much ground, and the discussion at points may
seem complicated and confusing, so please fasten your seatbelts.
■
GENOCIDE IN PREHISTORY, ANTIQUITY, AND EARLY MODERNITY
“The word is new, the concept is ancient,” wrote Leo Kuper in his seminal text of
genocide studies (1981).
1
* The roots of genocide are lost in distant millennia, and
will remain so unless an “archaeology of genocide” can be developed.
2
The difficulty,
as Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn pointed out in their early study, is that such
historical records as exist are ambiguous and undependable. While history today is
generally written with some fealty to “objective” facts, most previous accounts aimed
rather to praise the writer’s patron (normally the leader) and to emphasize the
superiority of one’s own gods and religious beliefs. They may also have been intended
3
CHAPTER 1
* Throughout this book, to reduce footnoting, I gather sequential quotations and citations from the same
source into an omnibus note at the end of the passage. Epigraphs for chapters and sections are not
footnoted.
as rattling good stories – so that when Homer quotes King Agamemnon’s quintes-
sential pronouncement of root-and-branch genocide, one cannot know what basis
it might have in fact:
We are not going to leave a single one of them alive, down to the babies in their
mothers’ wombs – not even they must live. The whole people must be wiped out
of existence, and none be left to think of them and shed a tear.
3
Factually reliable or not, Agamemnon’s chilling command encapsulates a fondly held
fantasy of kings and commoners alike. Humanity has always nurtured conceptions
of social difference that generate a primordial sense of in-group versus out-group, as
well as hierarchies of good and evil, superior and inferior, desirable and undesirable.
Chalk and Jonassohn again:
Historically and anthropologically peoples have always had a name for themselves.
In a great many cases, that name meant “the people” to set the owners of that name
off against all other people who were considered of lesser quality in some way. If
the differences between the people and some other society were particularly large
in terms of religion, language, manners, customs, and so on, then such others
were seen as less than fully human: pagans, savages, or even animals.
4
The fewer the shared values and standards, the more likely members of the out-group
were (and are) to find themselves beyond the “universe of obligation,” in sociologist
Helen Fein’s evocative phrase. Hence the advent of “religious traditions of contempt
and collective defamation, stereotypes, and derogatory metaphor indicating the victim
is inferior, sub-human (animals, insects, germs, viruses) or super-human (Satanic,
omnipotent).” If certain classes of people are “pre-defined as alien...subhuman or
dehumanized, or the enemy,” it follows that they must “be eliminated in order that
we may live (Them or Us).”
5
A vivid example of this mindset is the text that underpins the cultural tradition
common to most readers of this book: the biblical Old Testament. This frequently
depicts God, as one commentator put it, as “a despotic and capricious sadist,”
6
and
his followers as génocidaires (genocidal killers). The trend starts early on, in the Book
of Genesis (6: 17–19), where God decides “to destroy all flesh in which is the breath
of life from under heaven,” with the exception of Noah and a nucleus of human and
animal life. Elsewhere, “the principal biblical rationale for genocide is the danger
that God’s people will be infected (by intermarriage, for example) by the religious
practices of the people who surround them. They are to be a holy people – i.e., a
people kept apart, separated from their idolatrous neighbors. Sometimes, the only
sure means of accomplishing this is to destroy the neighbors.”
7
Thus, in 1 Samuel
15: 2–3, “the LORD of hosts” declares: “I will punish the Amalekites for what they
did in opposing the Israelites when they came up out of Egypt. Now go and attack
Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have; do not spare them, but kill both man
and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.”
8
Sometimes, as in
Numbers 31, the genocide is more selective – too selective for God’s tastes. As Yehuda
Bauer summarizes this passage:
ORIGINS OF GENOCIDE
4
All Midianite men are killed by the Israelites in accordance with God’s command,
but his order, transmitted by Moses, to kill all the women as well is not carried
out, and God is angry. Moses berates the Israelites, whereupon they go out and
kill all the women and all the male children; only virgin girls are left alive, for
obvious reasons.
9
“Obvious reasons,” in that many genocides in prehistory and antiquity were designed
not just to eradicate enemy ethnicities, but to incorporate and exploit some of
their members. Usually, it was children (particularly girls) and women who
were spared murder. They were simultaneously seen as unable to offer physical
resistance, and as sources of future offspring for the dominant group (descent in
patrilineal society being traced through the bloodline of the male). We see here the
roots of gendercide against adult males and adolescent boys, discussed further in
Chapter 13.
A combination of gender-selective (gendercidal) mass killing and root-and-branch
genocide pervades accounts of the wars of antiquity. Chalk and Jonassohn provide a
wide-ranging selection of historical events such as the Assyrian Empire’s root-and-
branch depredations in the first half of the first millennium
BCE
,* and the destruction
of Melos by Athens during the Peloponnesian War (fifth century
BCE
), a gendercidal
rampage described by Thucydides in his “Melian Dialogue.”
Rome’s siege and eventual razing of Carthage at the close of the Third Punic
War (149–46
BCE
) has been labeled “The First Genocide” by Yale scholar Ben
Kiernan. The “first” designation is debatable; the label of genocide, less so. Fueled
by the documented ideological zealotry of the senator Cato, Rome sought to sup-
press the supposed threat posed by (disarmed, mercantile) Carthage. “Of a population
of 2–400,000, at least 150,000 Carthaginians perished,” writes Kiernan. The
“Carthaginian solution” found many echoes in the warfare of subsequent centuries.
10
Among Rome’s other victims during its imperial ascendancy were the followers
of Jesus Christ. After his death at Roman hands in 33
CE
, Christ’s growing legions
of followers were subjected to savage persecutions and mass murder. The scenes of
torture and public spectacle were duplicated by Christians themselves during Europe’s
medieval era (approximately the ninth to fourteenth centuries
CE
). This period
produced onslaughts such as the Crusades: religiously sanctified campaigns against
“unbelievers,” whether in France (the Albigensian crusade against heretic Cathars)
or in the Holy Land of the Middle East.
11
Further génocidaires arose on the other
side of the world. In the thirteenth century, a million or so Mongol horsemen under
their leader, Genghis Khan, surged out of the grasslands of East Asia to lay waste
to vast territories, extending to the gates of Western Europe; “entire nations were
exterminated, leaving behind nothing but rubble, fallow fields, and bones.”
12
ORIGINS OF GENOCIDE
5
*“
BCE
” means “Before the Common Era,” and replaces the more familiar but ethnocentric “
BC
” (Before
Christ). “
CE
” replaces “
AD
”(Anno Domini, Latin for “year of the Lord”). For discussion, see
ReligiousTolerance.org, “The Use of ‘
CE
’ and ‘
BCE
’ to Identify Dates,” http://www.religioustolerance.
org/ce.htm.
In addition to religious and cultural beliefs, what appears to have motivated
these genocides was the hunger for wealth, power, and fame. These factors combined
to fuel the genocides of the early modern era, dating from approximately 1492, the
year of Caribbean Indians’ fateful (and fatal) discovery of Christopher Columbus.
The encounter between expansionist European civilization and the indigenous
populations of the world is detailed in Chapter 3. The following section focuses
briefly on two cases from the early modern era: a European one that presages the
genocidal civil wars of the twentieth century, and an African one reminding us that
genocide knows no geographical or cultural boundaries.
The Vendée uprising
In 1789, French revolutionaries, inspired by the example of their American
counterparts, overthrew the despotic regime of King Louis XVI and established a
new order based on the “Rights of Man.” Their actions provoked immediate and
intractable opposition at home and abroad. European armies massed on French
borders, posing a mortal threat to the revolutionary government in Paris, and in
March 1793 – following the execution of King Louis and the imposition of a
levée en masse (mass conscription) – homegrown revolt sprouted in the Vendée.
The population of this isolated and conservative region of western France declared
itself unalterably opposed to the replacement of their priests by pro-revolutionary
designates, and the evisceration of the male population by the levée. Well trained and
led by royalist officers, Vendeans rose up against the central authority. That authority
was itself undergoing a rapid radicalization: the notorious “Terror” of the Jacobin
faction was instituted the same month as the rebellion in St.-Florent-le-Vieil. The
result was a ferocious civil war that, according to French author Reynald Secher
among others, constituted a genocide against the Vendean people.
13
Early rebel victories were achieved through the involvement of all demographic
sectors of the Vendée, and humiliated the central authority. Fueled by the ideological
fervor of the Terror, and by foreign and domestic counter-revolution, the revolution-
aries in Paris implemented a classic campaign of root-and-branch genocide. Under
Generals Jean-Baptiste Carrier and Louis Marie Turreau, the Republican authorities
launched a scorched-earth drive by the aptly named colonnes infernales (“hellish
columns”). On December 11, 1793, Carrier wrote to the Committee of Public
Safety in Paris, pledging to purge the Vendean peasantry “absolutely and totally.”
14
Similar edicts by General Turreau in early 1794 were enthusiastically approved
by the Committee, which declared that the “race of brigands” in the Vendée was to
be “exterminated to the last.” This included even children, who were “just as
dangerous [as adults], because they were or were in the process of becoming brigands.”
Root-and-branch extermination was “both sound and pure,” the Committee wrote,
and should “show great results.”
15
The resulting slaughter targeted all inhabitants of the Vendée – even those who
supported the Republicans (in today’s terminology, these victims were seen as
“collateral damage”). Specifically, none of the traditional gender-selective exemptions
was granted to adult females, who stood accused of fomenting the rebellion through
ORIGINS OF GENOCIDE
6
their defense of conservative religion, and their “goad[ing] . . . into martyrdom” of
Vendean men.
16
In the account of a Vendean abbé, perhaps self-interested but
buttressed by other testimony:
There were poor girls, completely naked, hanging from tree branches, hands tied
behind their backs, after having been raped. It was fortunate that, with the Blues
[Republicans] gone, some charitable passersby delivered them from this shameful
torment. Elsewhere, in a refinement of barbarism, perhaps without precedent,
pregnant women were stretched out and crushed beneath wine presses....Bloody
limbs and nursing infants were carried in triumph on the points of bayonets.
17
Possibly 150,000 people died in the carnage, though not all were civilians. The
generalized character of the killings was conveyed by post-genocide census figures,
which evidenced not the usual war-related disparity of male versus female victims, but
a rough – and rare – parity. Only after this “ferocious...expression of ideologically
charged avenging terror,”
18
and with the collapse of the Committee of Public Safety
in Paris, did the genocidal impetus wane, though scattered clashes with rebels
continued through 1796.
In the context of comparative genocide studies, the Vendée uprising stands as
a notable example of a mass-killing campaign that has only recently been concep-
tualized as “genocide.” This designation is not universally shared, but it seems
apt in light of the large-scale murder of a designated group (the Vendean civilian
population).
Zulu genocide
Between 1810 and 1828, the Zulu kingdom under its dictatorial leader, Shaka Zulu,
waged one of the most ambitious campaigns of expansion and annihilation the region
has ever known. Huge swathes of present-day South Africa and Zimbabwe were laid
waste by Zulu armies. The European invasion of these regions, which began shortly
after, was greatly assisted by the upheaval and depopulation caused by the Zulu
assault.
The scale of the destruction was such, and the obliteration or dispersal of victims
so intensive, that relatively little historical evidence was left to bear testimony to the
terror. But it remains alive in the oral traditions of peoples of the region whose
ancestors were subjugated, slaughtered, or put to flight by the Zulus.
19
“To this day,
peoples in Zimbabwe, Malawi, Zambia, Tanzania, Kenya, and Uganda can trace their
descent back to the refugees who fled from Shaka’s warriors.”
20
At times, Shaka apparently implemented a gender-selective extermination
strategy that is all but unique in the historical record. In conquering the Butelezi
clan, Shaka “conceived the then [and still] quite novel idea of utterly demolishing
them as a separate tribal entity by incorporating all their manhood into his own clan
or following,” thereby bolstering his own military; but he “usually destroyed
women, infants, and old people,” who were deemed useless for his expansionist
purposes.
21
ORIGINS OF GENOCIDE
7
However, root-and-branch strategies reminiscent of the French rampage in the
Vendée seem also to have been common. According to Yale historian Michael
Mahoney, Zulu armies often aimed not only at defeating enemies but at “their total
destruction. Those exterminated included not only whole armies, but also prisoners
of war, women, children, and even dogs.”
22
Especially brutal means, including
impaling, were chosen to eliminate the targets. In exterminating the helpless followers
of Beje, a minor Kumalo chief, Shaka determined “not to leave alive even a child,
but [to] exterminate the whole tribe,” according to a foreign witness. When the
foreigners protested against the slaughter of women and children, claiming they
“could do no injury,” Shaka responded in language that would have been familiar
to the French revolutionaries: “Yes they could,” he declared. “They can propagate
and bring [bear] children, who may become my enemies . . . therefore I command
you to kill all.”
23
Mahoney characterizes these policies as genocidal. “If genocide is defined as a state-
mandated effort to annihilate whole peoples, then Shaka’s actions in this regard must
certainly qualify.” He points out that the term adopted by the Zulus to denote their
campaign of expansion and conquest, izwekufa, derives “from Zulu izwe (nation,
people, polity), and ukufa (death, dying, to die). The term is thus identical to
‘genocide’ in both meaning and etymology.”
24
■
NAMING GENOCIDE: RAPHAEL LEMKIN
Until the Second World War, the phenomenon of genocide was a “crime without a
name,” in the words of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.
25
The man who
named the crime, placed it in a global-historical context, and demanded intervention
and remedial action was an obscure Polish-Jewish jurist, a refugee from Nazi-occupied
Europe, named Raphael Lemkin (1900–59). His personal story is one of the most
remarkable of the twentieth century.
Lemkin is an exceptional example of a “norm entrepreneur” (see Chapter 12). In
four short years, he succeeded in coining a term – genocide – that concisely captured
an age-old historical phenomenon. He supported it with a wealth of historical
documentation. He published a lengthy book (Axis Rule in Occupied Europe) that
applied the concept to campaigns of genocide underway in Lemkin’s native Poland
and elsewhere in the Nazi-occupied territories. He then waged a successful campaign
to persuade the new United Nations to draft a convention against genocide; another
successful campaign to obtain the required number of signatures; and another to
secure the necessary national ratifications. Yet Lemkin died in obscurity in 1959; his
funeral drew just seven people. Only in recent years has the promise of his concept,
and the UN convention that incorporated it, begun to be realized.
It is important not to romanticize Lemkin. He was an austere loner who
antagonized many of those with whom he came into contact.
26
His preoccupation
with genocide also drew him into bizarre opposition to other human rights initiatives,
such as the Declaration of Human Rights (which became the central rights document
of the contemporary age). Many have criticized the ambiguities of the genocide
framework, as well as its allegedly archaic elements. We will consider these criticisms
ORIGINS OF GENOCIDE
8
shortly. First, though, let us review the extraordinary course of Lemkin’s life. This is
examined at length in the first chapters of Samantha Power’s “A Problem from Hell,”
with access to Lemkin’s letters and papers; the following account is based on Power’s
study.
27
Growing up in a Jewish family in Wolkowysk, a town in eastern Poland, Lemkin
developed a talent for languages (he would end up mastering a dozen or more), and
a passionate curiosity about the national cultures that produced them. He was struck
by accounts of the suffering of Christians at Roman hands, and its parallel in the
pogroms then afflicting the Jews of eastern Poland. Thus began Lemkin’s lifelong
obsession with mass killing in history and the contemporary world. He “raced
through an unusually grim reading list”
28
that familiarized him with cases from
antiquity and the medieval era (including Carthage, discussed above, and the fate of
the Aztec and Inca empires, described in Chapter 3). “I was appalled by the frequency
of the evil,” he recalled later, “and, above all, by the impunity coldly relied upon by
the guilty.”
29
Why? was the question that began to consume Lemkin. Why did states
kill their own and other citizens on the basis of nationality, ethnicity, or religion? Why
did onlookers ignore the killing, or applaud it? Why didn’t someone intervene?
Lemkin determined to stage an intellectual and activist intervention in what he
at first called “barbarity” and “vandalism.” The former referred to “the premeditated
destruction of national, racial, religious and social collectivities,” while the latter he
described as the “destruction of works of art and culture, being the expression of the
particular genius of these collectivities.”
30
At a conference of European legal scholars
in Madrid in 1933, Lemkin’s framing was first presented (though not by its author;
the Polish government denied him a travel visa). Despite the post-First World War
prosecutions of Turks for “crimes against humanity” (Chapter 4), governments and
public opinion leaders were still wedded to the notion that state sovereignty trumped
atrocities against a state’s own citizens. It was this legal impunity that rankled and
galvanized Lemkin more than anything else. But the Madrid delegates did not share
his passionate concern. They refused to adopt a resolution against the crimes Lemkin
set before them; the matter was tabled.
Undeterred, Lemkin continued his campaign. He presented his arguments in
legal forums throughout Europe in the 1930s, and as far afield as Cairo, Egypt. The
outbreak of the Second World War found him at the heart of the inferno – in Poland,
with Nazi forces invading from the West, and Soviets from the East. As Polish
resistance crumbled, Lemkin took flight. He traveled first to eastern Poland, and then
to Vilnius, Lithuania. From that Baltic city he made use of connections in Sweden,
and succeeded in securing refuge there.
After a spell of teaching in Stockholm, the United States beckoned. Lemkin
believed the US would be both receptive to his framework, and in a position to
actualize it in a way that Europe under the Nazi yoke could not. An epic 14,000-
mile journey took him across the Soviet Union by train to Vladivostok, by boat to
Japan, and across the Pacific. In the US, he moonlighted at Yale University’s Law
School before moving to Durham, North Carolina, where he had been offered a
professorship at Duke University.
In his new American surroundings, Lemkin struggled with his concepts and
vocabulary. “Vandalism” and “barbarity” had not struck much of a chord with his
ORIGINS OF GENOCIDE
9
legal audiences. Inspired by, of all things, the Kodak camera,
31
Lemkin trolled
through his impressive linguistic resources for a term that was concise and
memorable. He settled on a neologism with both Greek and Latin roots: the Greek
“genos,” meaning race or tribe, and the Latin “cide,” or killing. “Genocide” was the
intentional destruction of national groups on the basis of their collective identity.
Physical killing was an important part of the picture, but it was only a part, as Lemkin
stressed repeatedly:
By “genocide” we mean the destruction of a nation or an ethnic group....
Generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction
of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation.
It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at
the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the
aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would
be disintegration of the political and social institutions of culture, language,
national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and
the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the
lives of the individuals belonging to such groups. Genocide is directed against
the national group as an entity, and the actions involved are directed against
individuals, not in their individual capacity, but as members of the national group.
ORIGINS OF GENOCIDE
10
Figure 1.1 Raphael
Lemkin (1900–59)
Source: Hans Knopf/
Courtesy Jim Fussell/
preventgenocide.org.
...Genocide has two phases: one, destruction of the national pattern of the
oppressed group; the other the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor.
This imposition, in turn, may be made upon the oppressed population which is
allowed to remain, or upon the territory alone, after removal of the population and
the colonization of the area by the oppressor’s own nationals.
32
The critical question, for Lemkin, was whether the multifaceted campaign proceeded
under the rubric of policy. To the extent that it did, it could be considered genocidal,
even if it did not result in the physical destruction of all (or any) members of the
group.
33
The issue of whether mass killing is definitional to genocide has been debated
ever since, by legal scholars, social scientists, and commentators. Equally vexing
for subsequent generations was the emphasis on ethnic and national groups. These
predominated as victims in the decades in which Lemkin developed his frame-
work (and in the historical examples he studied). But by the end of the 1940s,
and into the twilight of the Stalinist era in the 1950s, it was clear that political groups
would play a prominent if not dominant role as targets for destruction. Moreover,
the appellations applied to “communists,” or by communists to “kulaks” or “class
enemies” – when imposed by a totalitarian state – seemed every bit as difficult to shake
as ethnic identifications, if the Nazi and Stalinist onslaughts were anything to go by.
This does not even take into account the important but ambiguous areas of cross-over
among ethnic, political, and social categories.
But Lemkin would hear little of this. Although he did not exclude political groups
as genocide victims, he had a single-minded focus on nationality and ethnicity, for
their culture-carrying capacity as he perceived it. His attachment to these core
concerns was almost atavistic, and US law professor Stephen Holmes, for one, has
faulted him for it:
Lemkin himself seems to have believed that killing a hundred thousand people
of a single ethnicity was very different from killing a hundred thousand people of
mixed ethnicities. Like Oswald Spengler, he thought that each cultural group had
its own “genius” that should be preserved. To destroy, or attempt to destroy, a
culture is a special kind of crime because culture is the unit of collective memory,
whereby the legacies of the dead can be kept alive. To kill a culture is to cast its
individual members into individual oblivion, their memories buried with their
mortal remains. The idea that killing a culture is “irreversible” in a way that killing
an individual is not reveals the strangeness of Lemkin’s conception from a liberal-
individualist point of view.
This archaic-sounding conception has other illiberal implications as well. For one
thing, it means that the murder of a poet is morally worse than the murder of a janitor,
because the poet is the “brain” without which the “body” cannot function. This
revival of medieval organic imagery is central to Lemkin’s idea of genocide as a special
crime.
34
It is probably true that Lemkin’s formulation had its archaic elements. It is certainly
the case that subsequent scholarly and legal interpretations of “Lemkin’s word” have
tended to be more capacious in their framing. What can be defended, I think, is
ORIGINS OF GENOCIDE
11
Lemkin’s emphasis on the collective as a target. One can philosophize about the
relative weight ascribed to collectives over the individual, as Holmes does; but
the reality of modern times is that the vast majority of those murdered were killed
on the basis of a collective identity – even if only one imputed by the killers. The link
between collective and mass, then between mass and large-scale extermination, was
the defining dynamic of the twentieth century’s unprecedented violence. In his
historical studies, Lemkin appears to have read this correctly. Many or most of the
examples he cites would be uncontroversial among a majority of genocide scholars
today.
35
He saw the Nazis’ assaults on Jews, Poles, and Polish Jews for what they were,
and labeled the broader genre for the ages.
But for Lemkin’s word to resonate today, and into the future, two further devel-
opments were required. The UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of
Genocide (1948), adopted in remarkably short order after Lemkin’s indefatigable
lobbying, entrenched genocide in international and domestic law. And beginning
in the 1970s, a coterie of “comparative genocide scholars,” drawing upon a gener-
ation’s work on the Jewish Holocaust,* began to discuss, debate, and refine Lemkin’s
concept – a trend that shows no sign of abating.
■
DEFINING GENOCIDE: THE UN CONVENTION
Lemkin’s extraordinary “norm entrepreneurship” around genocide is described in
Chapter 12. Suffice it to say for the present that “rarely has a neologism had such rapid
success” (William Schabas). Barely a year after Lemkin coined the term, it was
included in the Nuremberg indictments of Nazi war criminals (Chapter 15). To
Lemkin’s chagrin, genocide did not figure in the Nuremberg judgments. However,
“by the time the General Assembly completed its standard sitting, with the 1948
adoption of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of
Genocide, ‘genocide’ had a detailed and quite technical definition as a crime against
the law of nations.”
36
The “detailed and technical definition” is as follows:
Article I. The Contracting Parties confirm that genocide, whether committed in
time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law which they
undertake to prevent and to punish.
Article II. In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts
committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial
or religious group, as such:
ORIGINS OF GENOCIDE
12
* I use the word “holocaust” generically in this book to refer to especially destructive genocides, such as
those against indigenous peoples in the Americas and elsewhere, Ottoman Armenians in the First World
War, Jews and Roma during the Second World War, and Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994. Most scholars and
commentators capitalize the “h” when referring to the Nazi genocide against the Jews, and I follow this
usage when citing “the Jewish Holocaust” (see also Chapter 6, n. 1).
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about
its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Article III. The following acts shall be punishable:
(a) Genocide;
(b) Conspiracy to commit genocide;
(c) Direct and public incitement to commit genocide;
(d) Attempt to commit genocide;
(e) Complicity in genocide.
37
Thematically, Lemkin’s conviction that genocide needed to be confronted, whatever
the context, was ringingly endorsed with the Convention’s declaration that genocide
is a crime “whether committed in time of peace or in time of war.” This removed
the road-block thrown up by the Nuremberg trials, which had only considered Nazi
crimes committed after the invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939.
The basic thrust of Lemkin’s emphasis on ethnic and national groups (at the
expense of political groups and social classes) also survived the lobbying and drafting
process. In the diverse genocidal strategies cited, meanwhile, we see reflected Lemkin’s
conception of genocide as a “coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the
destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim
of annihilating the groups themselves.” However, at no point did the Convention’s
drafters actually define “national, ethnical, racial or religious” groups, and these have
been subject to considerable subsequent interpretation. The position of the Rwanda
tribunal (ICTR), that “any stable and permanent group” is in fact to be accorded
protection under the Convention, is likely to become the norm in future judgments.
With regard to genocidal strategies, note the diversity of actions in Article II that
qualify as genocidal – in marked contrast to the normal understanding of “genocide.”
One does not need to exterminate or seek to exterminate every last member of a
designated group. In fact, one does not need to kill anyone at all to commit genocide!
Inflicting “serious bodily or mental harm” qualifies, as does preventing births or
transferring children between groups. It is fair to say, however, that from a legal
perspective, genocide unaccompanied by mass killing is rare, and has stood little
chance of being prosecuted. (I return below to the question of killing.)
Controversial and ambiguous phrases in the document include the reference
to “serious bodily or mental harm” constituting a form of genocide. In practice, this
has been interpreted along the lines of the Israeli trial court decision against Adolf
Eichmann in 1961, convicting him of the “enslavement, starvation, deportation and
persecution of...Jews...their detention in ghettos, transit camps and concentra-
tion camps in conditions which were designed to cause their degradation, deprivation
of their rights as human beings, and to . . . cause them inhumane suffering and
torture.” The Rwanda tribunal (ICTR) adds an interpretation that this includes
“bodily or mental torture, inhuman treatment, and persecution,” as well as “acts of
ORIGINS OF GENOCIDE
13
rape and mutilation.” In addition, “several sources correctly take the view that mass
deportations under inhumane conditions may constitute genocide if accompanied by
the requisite intent.”
38
“Measures to prevent births” may be held to include forced
sterilization and separation of the sexes. Sexual trauma and impregnation through
gang rape have received increasing attention. The destruction of groups “as such”
brought complex questions of motive into play. Some drafters saw it as a means of
paying lip-service to the element of motive, while others perceived it as a way to side-
step the issue altogether.
Historically, it is intriguing to note how many issues of genocide definition and
interpretation have their roots in contingent and improvised aspects of the drafting
process. The initial draft by the UN Secretariat defined genocide’s targets as “a group
of human beings,” adoption of which could have rendered redundant the subsequent
debate over which groups qualified.
Responsibility for the exclusion of political groups was long laid at the door of
the Soviet Union and its allies, supposedly nervous about possible application of the
Convention to Soviet crimes (see Chapter 5). Schabas quashes this notion, pointing
out that “rigorous examination of the travaux [working papers] fails to confirm
a popular impression in the literature that the opposition...was some Soviet
machination.” Political collectivities “were actually included within the enumeration
[of designated groups] until an eleventh-hour compromise eliminated the reference.”
The provision against transferring children between groups, meanwhile, “was added
to the Convention almost as an afterthought, with little substantive debate or
consideration.”
39
In its opening sentence, the Convention declares that the Contracting Parties
“undertake to prevent and to punish” the crime of genocide. A subsequent article
(VIII) states that “any Contracting Party may call upon the competent organs of the
United Nations to take such action under the Charter of the United Nations as they
consider appropriate for the prevention and suppression of acts of genocide or any
of the other acts enumerated in Article III.” But this leaves actual obligations vague.
■
BOUNDING GENOCIDE: COMPARATIVE GENOCIDE STUDIES
Between the 1950s and the 1980s, the term “genocide” languished almost unused
by scholars. A handful of legal commentaries appeared for a specialized audience.
40
In 1975, Vahakn Dadrian’s article “A Typology of Genocide” sparked renewed interest
in a comparative framing. It was bolstered by Irving Louis Horowitz’s Genocide: State
Power and Mass Murder (1976), retitled Taking Lives in subsequent editions and,
foundationally, by Leo Kuper’s Genocide: Its Political Use in the Twentieth Century
(1981). Kuper’s work, including a subsequent volume on The Prevention of Genocide
(1985), was the most significant on genocide since Lemkin’s in the 1940s. It was
followed by edited volumes and solo publications from Helen Fein, R.J. Rummel,
Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn, and Robert Melson, among others.
This early literature drew upon more than a decade of intensive research on the
Jewish Holocaust, and most of the scholars were Jewish. “Holocaust Studies” has
remained central to the field. But rereading this early work, one is struck by how
ORIGINS OF GENOCIDE
14
inclusive and comparative is its framing. It tends to be global in scope, and broadly
interdisciplinary at many points. The classic volumes by Chalk and Jonassohn (The
History and Sociology of Genocide) and Totten et al.(Century of Genocide) appeared
in the early 1990s, and seemed to sum up this drive for catholicity. So too, despite
its heavy focus on the Jewish Holocaust, did Israel Charny’s Encyclopedia of Genocide
(1999). A rich body of case-study literature has also developed, with genocides such
as those against the Armenians, Cambodians, and East Timorese – as well as
indigenous peoples worldwide – receiving serious and sustained attention.
The explosion of public interest in genocide in the 1990s, and the concomitant
growth of genocide studies as an academic field, has spawned a profusion of human-
istic and social-scientific studies, joined by memoirs and oral histories. (The wider
culture has also produced a steady stream of films on genocide and its reverberations,
including The Killing Fields, Schindler’s List, and Hotel Rwanda.)
To capture the richness and diversity of the genocide-studies literature in this short
section would be a hopeless task. What I hope to do is, first, to use that literature
constructively throughout this book; and, second, to provide suggestions for further
reading, encouraging readers to explore the bounty for themselves.
With this caveat in place, let me make a few generalizations, touching on debates
that will reappear at various points in these pages. Genocide scholars are concerned
with two basic tasks. First, they attempt to define genocide and bound it conceptually.
Second, they seek to prevent genocide. This implies understanding its comparative
dynamics, and generating prophylactic strategies that may be applied in emergencies.
Scholarly definitions of genocide reflect the ambiguities of the Genocide
Convention and its constituent debates. They can be confusing in their numerous
and often opposed variants. However, surveying some of the definitions on offer,
and combining them with the Lemkin and UN framings already cited, we can group
them into two broad categories, and isolate some key features and variables.
ORIGINS OF GENOCIDE
15
■
BOX 1.1 GENOCIDE: SCHOLARLY DEFINITIONS (in chronological
■
order)
Peter Drost (1959)
“Genocide is the deliberate destruction of physical life of individual human beings
by reason of their membership of any human collectivity as such.”
Vahakn Dadrian (1975)
“Genocide is the successful attempt by a dominant group, vested with formal
authority and/or with preponderant access to the overall resources of power, to
reduce by coercion or lethal violence the number of a minority group whose ultimate
continued
ORIGINS OF GENOCIDE
16
extermination is held desirable and useful and whose respective vulnerability is a
major factor contributing to the decision for genocide.”
Irving Louis Horowitz (1976)
“[Genocide is] a structural and systematic destruction of innocent people by a
state bureaucratic apparatus....Genocide represents a systematic effort over time
to liquidate a national population, usually a minority...[and] functions as a
fundamental political policy to assure conformity and participation of the citizenry.”
Leo Kuper (1981)
“I shall follow the definition of genocide given in the [UN] Convention. This is not
to say that I agree with the definition. On the contrary, I believe a major omission
to be in the exclusion of political groups from the list of groups protected. In the
contemporary world, political differences are at the very least as significant a basis
for massacre and annihilation as racial, national, ethnic or religious differences. Then
too, the genocides against racial, national, ethnic or religious groups are generally
a consequence of, or intimately related to, political conflict. However, I do not think
it helpful to create new definitions of genocide, when there is an internationally
recognized definition and a Genocide Convention which might become the basis
for some effective action, however limited the underlying conception. But since
it would vitiate the analysis to exclude political groups, I shall refer freely...to
liquidating or exterminatory actions against them.”
Jack Nusan Porter (1982)
“Genocide is the deliberate destruction, in whole or in part, by a government or its
agents, of a racial, sexual, religious, tribal or political minority. It can involve not only
mass murder, but also starvation, forced deportation, and political, economic and
biological subjugation. Genocide involves three major components: ideology,
technology, and bureaucracy/organization.”
Yehuda Bauer (1984)
N.B. Bauer distinguishes between “genocide” and “holocaust”: “[Genocide is] the
planned destruction, since the mid-nineteenth century, of a racial, national, or ethnic
group as such, by the following means: (a) selective mass murder of elites or parts
of the population; (b) elimination of national (racial, ethnic) culture and religious
life with the intent of ‘denationalization’; (c) enslavement, with the same intent;
ORIGINS OF GENOCIDE
17
(d) destruction of national (racial, ethnic) economic life, with the same intent;
(e) biological decimation through the kidnapping of children, or the prevention of
normal family life, with the same intent....[Holocaust is] the planned physical
annihilation, for ideological or pseudo-religious reasons, of all the members of a
national, ethnic, or racial group.”
John L. Thompson and Gail A. Quets (1987)
“Genocide is the extent of destruction of a social collectivity by whatever agents,
with whatever intentions, by purposive actions which fall outside the recognized
conventions of legitimate warfare.”
Isidor Wallimann and Michael N. Dobkowski (1987)
“Genocide is the deliberate, organized destruction, in whole or in large part, of racial
or ethnic groups by a government or its agents. It can involve not only mass murder,
but also forced deportation (ethnic cleansing), systematic rape, and economic and
biological subjugation.”
Henry Huttenbach (1988)
“Genocide is any act that puts the very existence of a group in jeopardy.”
Helen Fein (1988)
“Genocide is a series of purposeful actions by a perpetrator(s) to destroy a collectivity
through mass or selective murders of group members and suppressing the biological
and social reproduction of the collectivity. This can be accomplished through the
imposed proscription or restriction of reproduction of group members, increasing
infant mortality, and breaking the linkage between reproduction and socialization
of children in the family or group of origin. The perpetrator may represent the state
of the victim, another state, or another collectivity.”
Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn (1990)
“Genocide is a form of one-sided mass killing in which a state or other authority
intends to destroy a group, as that group and membership in it are defined by the
perpetrator.”
continued
ORIGINS OF GENOCIDE
18
Helen Fein (1993)
“Genocide is sustained purposeful action by a perpetrator to physically destroy a
collectivity directly or indirectly, through interdiction of the biological and social
reproduction of group members, sustained regardless of the surrender or lack of
threat offered by the victim.”
Steven T. Katz (1994)
“[Genocide is] the actualization of the intent, however successfully carried out, to
murder in its totality any national, ethnic, racial, religious, political, social, gender or
economic group, as these groups are defined by the perpetrator, by whatever
means.” (NB. Modified by Adam Jones in 2000 to read, “murder in whole or in
substantial part....”)
Israel Charny (1994)
“Genocide in the generic sense means the mass killing of substantial numbers of
human beings, when not in the course of military action against the military forces
of an avowed enemy, under conditions of the essential defencelessness of the
victim.”
Irving Louis Horowitz (1996)
“Genocide is herein defined as a structural and systematic destruction of innocent
people by a state bureaucratic apparatus [emphasis in original]. . . . Genocide means
the physical dismemberment and liquidation of people on large scales, an attempt
by those who rule to achieve the total elimination of a subject people.” (N.B.
Horowitz supports “carefully distinguishing the [Jewish] Holocaust from genocide”;
he also refers to “the phenomenon of mass murder, for which genocide is a
synonym”).
Barbara Harff (2003)
“Genocides and politicides are the promotion, execution, and/or implied consent of
sustained policies by governing elites or their agents – or, in the case of civil war,
either of the contending authorities – that are intended to destroy, in whole or part,
a communal, political, or politicized ethnic group.”
Discussion
The elements of definition may be divided into “harder” and “softer” positions,
paralleling the international–legal distinction between hard and soft law. According
to Christopher Rudolph,
those who favor hard law in international legal regimes argue that it enhances
deterrence and enforcement by signaling credible commitments, constraining self-
serving auto-interpretation of rules, and maximizing ‘compliance pull’ through
increased legitimacy. Those who favor soft law argue that it facilitates compromise,
reduces contracting costs, and allows for learning and change in the process of
institutional development.
41
In genocide scholarship, harder positions are guided by concerns that “genocide” will
be rendered banal or meaningless by careless use. Some argue that this diverts
attention from the proclaimed uniqueness of the Jewish Holocaust. Softer positions
reflect concerns that excessively rigid framings (for example, a focus on the total
physical extermination of a group) rule out too many actions that, logically and
morally, demand to be included. Their proponents may also wish to see a dynamic
and evolving genocide framework, rather than a static and inflexible one.
It should be noted that these basic positions do not map perfectly onto individual
authors and authorities. A given definition may even alternate between harder and
softer positions – as with the UN Convention, which features a decidedly “soft”
framing of genocidal strategies (including non-fatal ones), but a “hard” approach
when it comes to the victim groups whose destruction qualifies as genocidal. Steven
Katz’s 1994 definition, by contrast, features a highly inclusive framing of victimhood,
but a tightly restrictive view of genocidal outcomes: these are limited to the total
physical destruction of a group. The alteration of just a few words turns it into a softer
definition that happens to be my preferred one (see below).
Exploring further, the definitions address genocide’s agents, victims, goals, scale,
strategies, and intent.
Among agents, there is a clear focus on state and official authorities – Dadrian’s
“dominant group, vested with formal authority”; Horowitz’s “state bureaucratic
apparatus”; Porter’s “government or its agents” – to cite three of the first five defini-
tions proposed. However, some scholars abjure the state-centric approach (e.g., Chalk
and Jonassohn’s “state or other authority”; Fein’s [1993] “perpetrator”; Thompson and
Quets’ “whatever agents”). The UN Convention, too, cites “constitutionally
responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals” among possible agents
(Article IV). In practice, most genocide scholars continue to emphasize the role of
the state, while accepting that in some cases – as with settler colonialism (Chapter
3) – non-state actors may play a prominent or dominant role.
Victims are standardly identified as social minorities. They exhibit deep vulner-
ability and/or “essential defencelessness” (Charny). This is reflected in the intensively
“one-sided mass killing” inflicted upon them (see Dadrian, Horowitz, Chalk and
Jonassohn, and Fein [1993]). They may be internally constituted and self-identified
(that is, more closely approximating groups “as such,” as required by the Genocide
ORIGINS OF GENOCIDE
19
Convention). From other perspectives, however, target groups may be defined by
the perpetrators (e.g., Chalk and Jonassohn, Katz). The debate over political target
groups is reflected in Leo Kuper’s comments. Kuper grudgingly accepts the UN
Convention definition, but strongly regrets the exclusion of political groups.
The goals of genocide are held to be the destruction/eradication of the victim
group and/or its culture, but beyond this, the element of motive is surprisingly little
stressed. Lemkin squarely designated genocidal “objectives” as the “disintegration of
the political and social institutions of culture, language, national feelings, religion,
and the economic existence of national groups.” Bauer likewise emphasizes “dena-
tionalization.” Dadrian and Horowitz go a step further, with the former’s reference
to a collectivity “whose ultimate extermination is held to be desirable and useful,” and
Horowitz’s assertion of a state desire “to assure conformity and participation of the
citizenry.”
As for required scale, this ranges from Steven Katz’s targeting of a victim group
“in its totality” (paralleled by Yehuda Bauer’s genocide/holocaust distinction),
to phrasing like “in whole or part” (Harff, the UN Convention); “in whole or in
large part” (Wallimann and Dobkowski); and “in whole or in substantial part” (my
modification of Katz’s definition). Irving Louis Horowitz emphasizes the absolute
dimension of “mass” murder “for which genocide is a synonym.”
42
Some scholars
maintain a respectful silence on the issue, though the element of mass or “substantial”
casualties seems implicit in the cases they select and the analyses they develop.
Many people feel that lumping together a limited killing campaign, such as in
Kosovo in 1999, with an overwhelmingly exterminatory one, such as the Nazis’
attempted destruction of European Jews, cheapens the concept of “genocide.”
However, it is worth noting how another core concept of social science and public
discourse is deployed: war. We readily use “war” to designate conflicts that kill “only”
a few hundred or a few thousand people (e.g., the Soccer War of 1969 between
El Salvador and Honduras; the Falklands/Malvinas War of 1982), as well as epochal
descents into barbarity that kill millions or tens of millions. The gulf between
minimum and maximum toll here is comparable to that between Kosovo and the
Jewish Holocaust, but the use of “war” is uncontroversial. There seems to be no reason
why we should not distinguish between larger and smaller, more or less exterminatory
genocides in the same way.
Diverse genocidal strategies are depicted in the definitions. Lemkin referred to
a “coordinated plan of different actions,” and the UN Convention listed a range
of such acts. For the scholars listed in our set, genocidal strategies may be direct or
indirect (Fein [1993]), including “economic and biological subjugation” (Wallimann
and Dobkowski). They may include killing of elites (i.e., “eliticide”); “elimination
of national (racial, ethnic) culture and religious life with the intent of ‘denation-
alization’”; and “prevention of normal family life, with the same intent” (Bauer).
Helen Fein’s earlier definition emphasizes “breaking the linkage between reproduction
and socialization of children in the family or group of origin,” which carries a step
further the Convention’s injunction against “preventing births within the group.”
Regardless of the strategy chosen, a consensus exists that genocide is “committed
with intent to destroy” (UN Convention), is “structural and systematic” (Horowitz),
“deliberate [and] organized” (Wallimann and Dobkowski), “sustained” (Harff ), and
ORIGINS OF GENOCIDE
20
“a series of purposeful actions” (Fein; see also Thompson and Quets). Porter and
Horowitz stress the additional role of the state bureaucracy.
Crucially, there is growing agreement that group “destruction” must involve mass
killing and physical liquidation (see, e.g., Fein [1993], Charny, Horowitz,
Katz/Jones). But to repeat: this is not a feature of either Raphael Lemkin’s original
formulations or of the UN Convention. In both of these definitions, mass killing is
only one of a panoply of strategies available to génocidaires; the emphasis is on the
destruction of the group “as such,” not necessarily the physical annihilation of its
members.
The question of genocidal intent
Most scholars and legal theorists agree that intent defines genocide. But what defines
intent?
We begin by distinguishing intent from motive. According to Gellately and
Kiernan, in criminal law, including international criminal law, the specific motive
is irrelevant. Prosecutors need only to prove that the criminal act was intentional,
not accidental. A conquest or a revolution that causes total or partial destruction of
a group legally qualifies as intentional and therefore as genocide whatever the goal
or motive, so long as the acts of destruction were pursued intentionally.
43
Beyond this, the question of intent, as is so often true in genocide studies, centers
on whether a harder or softer framing is preferred. Does one require that intent
be wedded to a high degree of purposive, coordinated action against a target group?
This would seem to be called for by the Genocide Convention’s “enigmatic” phrasing,
that groups must be targeted “as such.” But as we have seen, this phrase was among
the spontaneous formulations of the drafting process; it was inserted to satisfy
delegates who sought “recognition of a motive component.”
44
It was not central to
the drafting of the Convention, and it need not dominate the concerns of genocide
scholars.
An opposing perspective declares that, regardless of the claimed objective of the
actions in question, they are intentional if they are perpetrated with the knowledge
or reasonable expectation that they will destroy a human group in whole or in part.
Legal opinion surrounding genocide has increasingly favored this more liberal
interpretation (see also Chapter 15). The Rome Statute of the International Criminal
Court (1998) reflects “a relatively broad understanding of intent”: “a person has intent
where...in relation to conduct, that person means to cause that consequence or is
aware that it will occur in the ordinary course of events.”
45
Likewise, the International
Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda stated in its historic Akayesu judgment (1998) that
“the offender is culpable because he knew or should have known that the act
committed would destroy, in whole or in part, a group.”
46
This understanding of intent combines specific intent, on the one hand, with
constructive intent, on the other. As summarized elegantly by Michael Reisman and
Charles Norchi, specific intent may be inferred “where actions with predictable results
are taken over an extended period of time, and the consequences of these actions
regularly confirm their outcome.”
47
Constructive intent, meanwhile (in Alex Alvarez’s
words),
ORIGINS OF GENOCIDE
21
includes cases in which the perpetrators did not intend to harm others but should
have realized or known that the behavior made the harm likely....Systematically
hunting down and killing members of a group, forcibly removing other members
to reservations and then withholding food and medicine, and kidnapping many
of their children to raise as slaves outside of the group’s culture clearly results in
the destruction of that group of people, even if that result is neither intended nor
desired.
48
Personal observations
Having explored some of the commonalities and complexities of genocide frame-
works, let me make clear my own preferences, since you will find them reflected in
this book. I adopt a generally soft and inclusive, rather than hard and restrictive,
definition of genocide. I share with Yale historian Jay Winter the conviction that
“If possible, the boundaries surrounding genocide ought to be drawn liberally and
not exclusively.”
49
I also share the Spanish National Audience’s desire, expressed in a
November 1998 legal ruling, for “a dynamic or evolutive interpretation of the
[Genocide] Convention.”
50
Accordingly, I prefer a broader rather than narrower
concept of genocidal intent; a fairly liberal approach to the issue of requisite numbers
killed; and an acceptance of diverse genocidal agents, strategies, and victim groups.
However, my position is at the harder end of the spectrum in one sense. I adopt
a narrower conception of genocidal strategy than some authorities (including Raphael
Lemkin and the Genocide Convention). Specifically, I consider mass killing to be
definitional to genocide. The inclusion of what some call “ethnocide” (cultural geno-
cide) is important, valid, and entirely in keeping with Lemkin’s original conception.
It is also actionable under the UN Convention; but in charting my own course,
I am wary of labeling as “genocide” cases where mass killing has not occurred.
The most succinct definition of genocide that I know of and agree with came
out of the UN Convention – but from the initial draft as prepared by the UN
Secretariat, not the one finally passed in 1948. The preamble here states that genocide
is “the intentional destruction of a group of human beings.”
51
“A group” is as concise
a formulation as we will have, if the collective dimension of genocide is considered
foundational. If a broad framing of intent is then adopted – for instance, if “a
conscious act or acts of advertent omission may be as culpable [because intentional]
as an act of commission,” in Benjamin Whitaker’s liberal (1985) interpretation – then
this is serviceable shorthand for the approach I take in this volume.
52
The definition of genocide that I have used most often over the past few years
adjusts Steven Katz’s 1994 offering. I appreciate Katz’s “soft” approach to victim
groups, and I think these are also worth listing, as he does. I support his emphasis
on the diversity of genocidal strategies (“by whatever means”) and on mass killing
as a core element, but with an italicized phrase, I remove Katz’s requirement of the
attempted total extermination of a group. Genocide is thus “the actualization of the
intent, however successfully carried out, to murder in whole or in substantial part any
national, ethnic, racial, religious, political, social, gender or economic group, as these
groups are defined by the perpetrator, by whatever means.” I prefer to leave
ORIGINS OF GENOCIDE
22
“substantial” imprecise; I hope its parameters will expand over time, together with
our capacity for empathy. It seems clear, though, that a threshold is passed when
victims mount into the tens or hundreds of thousands – although relative group size
must always be factored in.
The reader should remember, however, that there is just one legal definition of
genocide, and it is not mine. When I touch on legal aspects of genocide, I highlight
the UN Convention definition, but I deploy it and other legal framings instru-
mentally, not dogmatically. I seek to convey an understanding of genocide in which
international law is a vital but not dominant consideration.
■
CONTESTED CASES
With the varied academic definitions of genocide, and the ambiguities surrounding
both the Genocide Convention and historical interpretation, it is not surprising that
nearly every posited case of genocide will be discounted by someone else. Even the
“classic” genocides of the twentieth century have found their systematic downplayers
and deniers (see Chapter 14). In the case of perhaps the most enduring and
destructive genocide of all time, against indigenous peoples of the Americas (Chapter
3), most individuals in the countries concerned would probably reject the genocide
label.
With this in mind, let us consider a few controversial events and human
institutions. What can the debate over the applicability of a genocide framework in
these cases tell us about definitions of genocide, the ideas and interests that underlie
those definitions, and the evolution in thinking about genocide? I will offer my own
views in each case. Readers are also encouraged to consult the discussion of “famine
crimes” in chapters 2 and 5, and of genocide against political groups in Chapter 5
on Stalin’s USSR.
Atlantic slavery
Slavery is pervasive in human societies throughout history. Arguably in no context,
however, did it result in such massive mortality as with Atlantic slavery between the
sixteenth and nineteenth centuries.
53
A reasonable estimate of the deaths caused by this institution is fifteen to twenty
million people – by any standard, one of the worst holocausts in human history.
54
However, Atlantic slavery is rarely included in analyses or anthologies of genocide.
A notable exception – Seymour Drescher’s chapter in the volume Is the Holocaust
Unique? – avoids the “genocide” label, and stresses the differences between slavery and
the Jewish Holocaust.
55
(Admittedly, these are not few.) More recently, the renowned
human rights scholar, Michael Ignatieff, has cited slavery-as-genocide arguments as
a leading example of the tendency to “banalize” the genocide framework:
Thus slavery is called genocide, when – whatever else it was – it was a system to
exploit the living rather than to exterminate them....Genocide has no meaning
ORIGINS OF GENOCIDE
23
unless the crime can be connected to a clear intention to exterminate a human
group in whole or in part. Something more than rhetorical exaggeration for
effect is at stake here. Calling every abuse or crime a genocide makes it steadily
more difficult to rouse people to action when a genuine genocide is taking
place.
56
Ignatieff’s argument – that it was in slave owners’ interest to keep slaves alive, not
exterminate them – is probably the most common argument against slavery-as-
genocide. Others point to the ubiquity of slavery through time; the large-scale
collaboration of African chiefs and entrepreneurs in corraling Africans for slavery; and
the supposedly cheery results of slavery for slaves’ descendants, at least in North
America. Even some African-American commentators have celebrated their “deliv-
erance” from strife-torn Africa to lands of opportunity in the West.
57
My own view is that these arguments are mostly sophistry, serving to deflect
responsibility for one of history’s greatest crimes. To call Atlantic slavery genocide
is not to claim that “every abuse or crime” is genocide, as Ignatieff asserts; nor is it
even to designate all slavery as genocidal. Rather, it seems to me an appropriate
response to particular slavery institutions that inflicted “incalculable demographic
and social losses” on West African societies,
58
as well as meeting every other require-
ment of the UN Genocide Convention’s definition.
59
Moreover, the killing and
destruction were intentional, whatever the incentives to preserve survivors of the
Atlantic passage for labor exploitation. To revisit the issue of intent already touched
on: If an institution is deliberately maintained and expanded by discernible agents,
though all are aware of the hecatombs of casualties it is inflicting on a definable human
group, then why should this not qualify as genocide?
Area bombing and nuclear warfare
Controversy has swirled around the morality both of the area bombing of German
and Japanese cities by British and US air forces, and the atomic bombing of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. The key issue in both cases is at what point
legitimate military action spills over into genocide. The line is difficult to draw, in
part due to the intimate relationship between war and genocide, discussed in detail
in Chapter 2. In the case of strategic or “area” bombing (in which entire cities were
blanketed with high explosives, after pinpoint bombing had been rejected as
unworkable), the debate centers on the military utility and moral proportionality of
the policy. “The effects [themselves] are clear and undisputed”:
By the end of the war in 1945, every large and medium-sized German city, as well
as many smaller ones had been destroyed or badly damaged by the Allied strategic-
bombing offensive. Overall, 2.7 million tons of bombs were dropped, destroying
3.6 million homes (20 per cent of the country’s total), leaving 7.5 million
homeless. . . . The loss of life was substantial. Estimates of deaths range from about
300,000 to 600,000, and of injuries from 600,000 to over a million. ...Most of
the civilian victims were women, infants, and elderly people....About 19 per
ORIGINS OF GENOCIDE
24
cent of the victims were children under the age of 16, 5 per cent of whom were
babies and children below school age, and about 20 per cent of the casualties were
over the age of 60.
60
Similar destruction was inflicted on Japan, where some 900,000 civilians died.
A single night’s fire-bombing of Tokyo (March 9–10, 1945) killed between 90,000
and 100,000 people, more than the death-toll in the atomic bombing of Nagasaki.
61
Can this mass killing be seen as militarily necessary, or at least defensible? Did it
shorten the war, for example, and thereby save the lives of large numbers of Allied
soldiers? Should daylight bombing have been pursued, even though it was of
dubious efficacy and led to the deaths of more Allied pilots? Or was the bombing
indefensible, killing vastly more civilians than military requirements could possibly
justify?
From a genocide-studies perspective, at issue is whether civilian populations were
targeted (1) outside the boundaries of “legitimate” warfare, and (2) on the basis of
their ethnic or national identity. Answers have predictably differed, with the ground-
breaking genocide scholar Leo Kuper arguing that area bombing was genocidal (as
were the atomic bombings).
62
After a nuanced consideration of the matter, Eric
Markusen and David Kopf agreed.
63
Others reject the genocide framework. The
Nuremberg prosecutor Telford Taylor argued that the area bombings “were certainly
not ‘genocides’ within the meaning of the Convention...Berlin, London and Tokyo
were not bombed because their inhabitants were German, English or Japanese, but
because they were enemy strongholds. Accordingly, the killing ceased when the war
ended and there was no longer any enemy.”
64
The genocide framing is perhaps more persuasively applied in the Japanese case,
given the racist propaganda that pervaded the Pacific War, including the common
depiction of Japanese as apes and vermin (see Chapter 2). As well, the bombing
reached a crescendo when Japan was arguably prostrate before Allied air power. At
times, the destruction (through the “thousand-bomber” raids) appears to have been
inflicted to push the boundaries of the logistically possible, rather than for a coherent
military purpose.
Fewer ambiguities attach to the atomic bombings at war’s end. These were carried
out when Japan’s defeat was virtually certain; both Supreme Allied Commanders,
General Dwight D. Eisenhower and General Douglas MacArthur, considered them
to be “completely unnecessary.”
65
Other options were also available to the US
planners – including a softening of the demand for unconditional surrender, and
demonstration bombing away from major population centers. There is a consensus
that the destruction of Nagasaki, in particular, was gratuitous, since the power of
atomic weaponry was already evident, and the Japanese government was in crisis
discussions on surrender.
66
UN sanctions against Iraq
Following Saddam Hussein’s invasion and occupation of Kuwait in August 1990,
the United Nations, spearheaded by the US and Great Britain, imposed sweeping
ORIGINS OF GENOCIDE
25
economic sanctions on Iraq. These lasted beyond the 1991 Gulf War and, with
modifications, were maintained through to the invasion and occupation of Iraq
in 2003.
It rapidly became evident that the sanctions were exacting an enormous human
toll on Iraqis, particularly children. According to a “criminal complaint” filed by
former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark before a people’s tribunal in Madrid, the
policies were nothing short of genocidal:
The United States and its officials[,] aided and abetted by others[,] engaged in a
continuing pattern of conduct...to impose, maintain and enforce extreme
economic sanctions and a strict military blockade on the people of Iraq for the
purpose of injuring the entire population, killing its weakest members, infants,
children, the elderly and the chronically ill, by depriving them of medicines,
drinking water, food, and other essentials.
67
The debate has sparked controversy and some rancor among genocide scholars.
A majority reject the idea that genocide can be inflicted by “indirect” means such as
sanctions, or assign the bulk of responsibility for Iraqi suffering to the corrupt and
dictatorial regime of Saddam Hussein. Such arguments also emphasize the
modifications to the sanctions regime in the 1990s, notably the introduction of an
“Oil-for-Food” arrangement by which limited food and humanitarian purchases
could be made with Iraqi oil revenues, under UN oversight.
68
Those, including myself, who hold that the Iraq sanctions did constitute genocide
acknowledge the despotic nature of the Iraqi regime (see, e.g., Box 4a). However, they
point to the human damage linked by many impartial observers to the sanctions,
and the awareness of that damage, reflected in comments such as those of then-
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in May 1996. Responding to figures showing
500,000 child deaths from sanctions, Albright said: “I think this is a very hard choice.
But the price – we think the price is worth it.”
69
Is this “infanticide masquerading
as policy,” as US Congressman David Bonior alleged?
70
The reticence about the effects of sanctions may reflect the difficulty that many
Western observers have in acknowledging Western-inflicted genocides. In 1998 the
UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq, Denis Halliday – who witnessed the impact
of sanctions at first hand – resigned in protest over their allegedly genocidal character.
“I was made to feel by some that I had crossed an invisible line of impropriety,” he
stated the following year. “Since then I have observed that the term ‘genocide’ offends
many in our Western media and establishment circles when it is used to describe the
killing of others for which we are responsible, such as in Iraq.”
71
9/11
The attacks launched on New York and Washington on the morning of September
11, 2001 constituted the worst terrorist attack in history.
72
Perhaps never outside
wartime and natural disasters have so many people – well over 2,000 – been killed
more or less simultaneously. But were the attacks, apparently carried out by agents
ORIGINS OF GENOCIDE
26
of Osama bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda movement, more than terroristic? Did they in fact
constitute genocidal massacres by Leo Kuper’s definition?
73
In the aftermath of September 11, this question was debated on the H-Genocide
academic list. Citing the UN Convention, Peter Ronayne wrote: “[It] seems at least
on the surface that the argument could be made that Osama bin Laden and his ilk
are intent on destroying, in whole or in part, a national group, and they’re more than
willing to kill members of the group.” Robert Cribb, an Indonesia specialist, differed.
“Surely the attacks were terrorist, rather than genocidal. At least 20% of the victims
were not American, and it seems pretty likely that the destruction of human life was
not for its own sake...but to cause terror and anguish amongst a much broader
population, which it has done very effectively.”
74
Expanding on Ronayne’s reasoning, if we limit ourselves to the UN Convention
framing, the 9/11 attacks resulted in “killing members of the group,” intentionally
and (in most cases) “as such.” In addition, the “destruction[,]...terror and anguish”
they inflicted caused serious “bodily [and] mental harm to members” of the group.
Moreover, it seems highly likely that the ferocity of the attack was limited only by
the means available to the attackers (passenger jets used as missiles). Were nuclear
bombs at hand, one suspects that they would be used against civilian populations in
the US, and perhaps elsewhere. This brings us close to the Convention requirement
that genocidal acts be “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a
national ...group” (i.e., US Americans).
There is thus, at least, a palpable genocidal impetus and intent in 9/11 – one that
could yet result in fully fledged genocide. Only the coming decades will enable us
to place the attacks in proper perspective: to decide whether they stand as isolated and
discrete events and campaigns, or as opening salvos in a systematic campaign of
genocide.
Structural and institutional violence
In the 1960s, peace researchers such as Johan Galtung began exploring the phe-
nomenon of “structural violence”: destructive relations embedded in social and
economic systems. Some commentators argue that certain forms of structural and
institutional violence are genocidal, “deliberately inflicting on [a designated] group
conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in
part,” in the language of the UN Convention. For example, the Indian scholar and
activist Vandana Shiva has described “the globalization of food and agriculture
systems” under neoliberal trade regimes as “equivalent to the ethnic cleansing of the
poor, the peasantry, and small farmers of the Third World....Globalization of trade
in agriculture implies genocide.”
75
Jean Ziegler, the UN Special Rapporteur on the
Right to Food, stated in October 2005: “Every child who dies of hunger in today’s
world is the victim of assassination,” and referred to the daily death by starvation of
100,000 people as a “massacre of human beings through malnutrition.”
76
My own
work on gender and genocide (see Chapter 13) explores “gendercidal institutions”
such as female infanticide and even maternal mortality, suggesting that they are forms
of gender-selective mass killing, hence genocidal.
ORIGINS OF GENOCIDE
27
Much of structural violence is diffuse, part of the “background” of human
relations. It is accordingly difficult to ascribe clear agency to phenomena such as
racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination. International relations scholar
Kal Holsti rejects global-systemic visions of structural violence, like Galtung’s, as
“just too fuzzy,” and evincing a tendency to “place all blame for the ills of the Third
World on the first one.” In Holsti’s view, this overlooks the essential role of many
Third World leaders and elites in the suffering and violence experienced by their
populations. “It also fails to account for many former Third World countries that
today have standards of living and welfare higher than those found in many ‘indus-
trial’ countries.”
77
These points are well taken. Nonetheless, in my opinion, genocide studies should
move to incorporate a nuanced portrait of structural and institutional violence as
genocidal mechanisms. If our overriding concern is to prevent avoidable death and
suffering, how can we shut our eyes to “the Holocaust of Neglect” that malnutrition,
ill-health, and structural discrimination impose upon huge swathes of humanity?
78
Are we not in danger of “catching the small fry and letting the big fish loose,” as
Galtung put it?
79
Moreover, when it comes to human institutions, it is not necessarily the case that
responsibility and agency are impossible to establish. Consider the neoliberal
economic policies and institutions that shape the destinies of much of the world’s
poor. Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs played a key role in designing the “structural
adjustment” measures imposed by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund
(IMF) around the Third World and former Soviet bloc. He later turned against such
prescriptions, commenting in 2002 that they had “squeezed [targeted] countries to
the point where their health systems are absolutely unable to function. Education
systems are broken down, and there’s a lot of death associated with the collapse of public
health and the lack of access to medicine.”
80
In such cases, as Holsti points out, “distinct
agents with distinct policies and identifiable consequences” may be discerned, and
moral and legal responsibility may likewise be imputed.
81
■
IS GENOCIDE EVER JUSTIFIED?
This question is not often posed in genocide studies; it may provoke a collective intake
of breath.
82
Examining ourselves honestly, though, most people have probably
experienced at least a twinge of sympathy with those who commit acts that some
people consider genocidal. Others have gone much further, to outright celebration
of genocide (see, e.g., Chapter 3). Is any of this justifiable, morally or legally?
Perhaps the most common form of genocide justification and celebration is a
utilitarian one, applied most frequently in the case of indigenous peoples. These
populations have standardly been accused of failing to exploit the land they inhabit,
and its natural resources.
83
This latent economic potential, viewed through the lens
of the Protestant work ethic and capitalist profit, is held to warrant confiscation of
territories, and marginalization or annihilation of their populations.
Oppressed indigenous communities sometimes rose up in rebellion against
colonial authority. While these rebellions evoke widespread sympathy, they may also
ORIGINS OF GENOCIDE
28
be held to have taken, on occasion, a genocidal form. To the cases of Upper Peru
(Bolivia) in the late eighteenth century, and the Caste War of Yucatán in the
nineteenth, we might add the revolution in the French colony of Saint-Domingue
that, in 1804, created Haiti as the world’s first free black republic. This was a revolt
not of indigenous people, but of slaves. It succeeded in expelling the whites, albeit
at a devastating cost from which Haiti never really recovered. As in Bolivia and
Yucatán, rebellion and counter-rebellion assumed the form of unbridled race war.
Yet this war finds many sympathizers. The great scholar of the Haitian revolution,
C.L.R. James, described in the 1930s “the complete massacre” of Saint-Domingue’s
whites: “The population, stirred to fear at the nearness of the counter-revolution,
killed all [whites] with every possible brutality.” But James’ appraisal of the events
sanctioned the race war on the grounds of past atrocities and exploitation by whites.
Acknowledging that the victims were defenseless, James lamented only the damage
done to the souls of the killers, and their future political culture:
The massacre of the whites was a tragedy; not for the whites. For these old slave-
owners, those who burnt a little powder in the arse of a Negro, who buried him
alive for insects to eat . . . and who, as soon as they got the chance, began their
old cruelties again; for these there is no need to waste one tear or one drop of
ink. The tragedy was for the blacks and the Mulattoes [who did the killing]. It was
not policy but revenge, and revenge has no place in politics. The whites were no
longer to be feared, and such purposeless massacres degrade and brutalise a
[perpetrator] population, especially one which was just beginning as a nation and
had had so bitter a past. . . . Haiti suffered terribly from the resulting isolation.
Whites were banished from Haiti for generations, and the unfortunate country,
ruined economically, its population lacking in social culture, had its inevitable
difficulties doubled by this massacre.
84
Bolivia, Mexico, and Haiti are all examples of what Nicholas Robins and I call
subaltern genocide, or “genocides by the oppressed.”
85
In general, genocidal assaults
that contain a morally plausible element of revenge, retribution, or revolutionary
usurpation are less likely to be condemned, and are often welcomed. Allied fire-
bombing and nuclear-bombing of German and Japanese cities, which Leo Kuper
and other scholars considered to have been genocidal, are often justified on the
grounds that “they started it” (that is, the German and Japanese governments
launched mass bombings of civilians before the Allies did). The fate of ethnic-German
civilians in Czechoslovakia, Poland, and other Central European countries at the
end of the Second World War, and in its aftermath, likewise attracted little empathy
until recent times – again because, when it came to mass expulsions of populations
and attendant atrocities, the Germans too had “started it.” The quarter of a million
Serbs expelled from the Krajina and Eastern Slavonia regions of Croatia in 1995
(Chapter 8) now constitute the largest refugee population in Europe; but their
plight evokes no great outrage, because of an assignation of collective guilt to Serbs
for the Bosnian genocide. (The trend was evident again after the 1999 Kosovo war,
when Serb civilians in the province were targeted for murder by ethnic Albanian
extremists.)
86
ORIGINS OF GENOCIDE
29
Even the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and
Pentagon, which could be considered genocidal massacres, secured the equivocal
or enthusiastic support of hundreds of millions of people worldwide. Americans
were deemed to have gotten what was coming to them after decades of US imperial
intervention. A similar vocabulary of justification and celebration may be found
among many Arabs, and other Palestinian supporters, after massacres of Jewish
civilians in Israel.
Apart from cases of subaltern genocide, the defenders and deniers of some of
history’s worst genocides often justify the killings on the grounds of legitimate
defensive or retributory action against traitors and subversives. The Turkish refusal to
acknowledge the Armenian genocide (Chapter 4) depicts atrocities or “excesses” as
the inevitable results of an Armenian rebellion aimed at undermining the Ottoman
state. Apologists for Hutu Power in Rwanda claim the genocide of 1994 was nothing
more than the continuation of “civil war” or “tribal conflict”; or that Hutus were
seeking to pre-empt the kind of genocide at Tutsi hands that Hutus had suffered in
neighboring Burundi (Chapter 9). Sympathizers of the Nazi regime in Germany
sometimes present the invasion of the USSR as a pre-emptive, defensive war against
the Bolshevik threat to Western civilization (Box 6a). Even the Nazis’ demonology
of a Jewish “cancer” and “conspiracy” resonated deeply with millions of highly
educated Germans at the time, and fuels Holocaust denial to the present, though as
a fringe phenomenon.
All these cases of denial need to be rejected and confronted (see Chapter 14).
But are there instances when genocide may occur in self-defense? The Rome Statute
of the International Criminal Court abjures criminal proceedings against “the
person [who] acts reasonably to defend himself or herself or another person or...
against an imminent and unlawful use of force in a manner proportionate to
the degree of danger to the person or the other person or property protected.” Citing
this, William Schabas notes that “reprisal and military necessity are not formally
prohibited by international humanitarian law.” However, “reprisal as a defense
must be proportional, and on this basis its application to genocide would seem
inconceivable.”
87
But Schabas has a tendency, in defending a “hard” and predictably
legalistic interpretation of the UN Convention, to use terms such as “inconceivable,”
“obviously incompatible,” “totally unnecessary,” “definitely inappropriate.” Some-
times these may close off worthwhile discussions, such as: What is the acceptable
range of responses to genocide? Can genocidal counter-assault be “proportional” in
any meaningful sense?
A large part of the problem is that the plausibility we attach to reprisals and
retribution frequently reflects our political identifications. We have a harder time
condemning those with whom we sympathize, even when their actions are atrocious.
Consciously or unconsciously, we distinguish “worthy” from “unworthy” victims.
88
And we may be less ready to label as genocidal the atrocities that our chosen “worthy”
commit. We will return to this issue at the close of the book, when considering
personal responsibility for genocide prevention.
ORIGINS OF GENOCIDE
30
■
FURTHER STUDY
Alex Alvarez, Governments, Citizens, and Genocide: A Comparative and Interdisciplinary
Approach. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2001. If I had to select
one work to accompany or substitute for this one in a genocide course, it would
be Alvarez’s superb study.
George J. Andreopoulos, ed., Genocide: Conceptual and Historical Dimensions.
Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994. Uneven but sometimes
helpful compendium.
Omer Bartov, Anita Grossmann, and Mary Nolan, eds, Crimes of War: Guilt and
Denial in the Twentieth Century. New York: New Press, 2002. Fine introduction
to war crimes and genocide.
Kenneth J. Campbell, Genocide and the Global Village. New York: Palgrave, 2001.
Brief but piquant essay.
Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn, The History and Sociology of Genocide. New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 1990. Early and eclectic treatment, still widely read
and cited.
Israel W. Charny, ed., The Encyclopedia of Genocide, 2 vols. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-
CLIO, 1999. Useful reference work.
Levon Chorbajian and George Shirinian, eds, Studies in Comparative Genocide.New
York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999. First-rate collection of essays, with special attention
to the Armenian genocide.
Robert Gellately and Ben Kiernan, eds, The Specter of Genocide: Mass Murder in
Historical Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. One of the
best edited volumes on the subject; diverse and vigorously written throughout.
Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century. New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 1999. Addresses genocide but ranges far beyond it; a
central work of our time.
William L. Hewitt, ed., Defining the Horrific: Readings on Genocide and Holocaust
in the Twentieth Century. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, 2004.
Accessible, wide-ranging readings designed for classroom use.
Kurt Jonassohn with Karin Solveig Björnson, Genocide and Gross Human Rights
Violations in Comparative Perspective. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers,
1998. Eclectic, open-minded volume.
Adam Jones, ed., Genocide, War Crimes and the West: History and Complicity. London:
Zed Books, 2004. “The most comprehensive treatment of Western responsibility
for mass atrocity yet published” (Richard Falk); naturally I agree.
Leo Kuper, Genocide: Its Political Use in the Twentieth Century. Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1981. The foundational text of comparative genocide studies, still in
print.
Raphael Lemkin, Key Writings of Raphael Lemkin on Genocide. Compiled by
PreventGenocide.org, http://www.preventgenocide.org/lemkin. Online selection
of Lemkin’s core work on genocide.
Michael Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005. Sprawling, frankly exhausting study of
modernity and “murderous ethnic cleansing.”
ORIGINS OF GENOCIDE
31
Nicolaus Mills and Kira Brunner, eds, The New Killing Fields: Massacre and the
Politics of Intervention. New York: Basic Books, 2002. Exceptional essays, with a
journalistic tinge.
Samantha Power, “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide.New York:
Basic Books, 2002. Power’s multiple-award-winning work focuses on the US
response to various genocides.
Alan S. Rosenbaum, ed., Is the Holocaust Unique? Perspectives on Comparative
Genocide. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998. Important, controversial essays.
Richard L. Rubenstein, The Age of Triage: Fear and Hope in an Overcrowded World.
Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1983. Ground-breaking study of the elimination of
unwanted populations.
Dinah Shelton, ed., Encyclopedia of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity (3 vols).
Detroit, MI: Macmillan Reference, 2005. Massive, admirably inclusive work that
supersedes Charny’s edited encyclopedia (see above) as the standard reference.
Samuel Totten and Steven Leonard Jacobs, eds, Pioneers of Genocide Studies.New
Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2002. Testimonial essays by leading
scholars of comparative genocide studies.
Samuel Totten, William S. Parsons, and Israel W. Charny, eds, Century of Genocide:
Eyewitness Accounts and Critical Views (2nd edn). New York: Routledge, 2004.
Unparalleled collection of analyses and testimony.
Isidor Wallimann and Michael N. Dobkowski, eds, Genocide and the Modern Age:
Etiology and Case Studies of Mass Death. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press,
2000. Reissue of an early, now rather dated work.
Eric D. Weitz, A Century of Genocide: Utopias of Race and Nation. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2003. Cogent overview, with case studies paralleling
some in this volume.
Benjamin Whitaker, Revised and Updated Report on the Question of the Prevention and
Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (The Whitaker Report). ECOSOC (United
Nations), July 2, 1985, available in full at http://www.preventgenocide.org/
prevent/UNdocs/whitaker. Significant attempt to rethink and revise the UN
Genocide Convention.
■
NOTES
1 Leo Kuper, Genocide: Its Political Use in the Twentieth Century (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1981), p. 9.
2 Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn, The History and Sociology of Genocide: Analyses and Case
Studies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), p. 64.
3 Quoted in Chalk and Jonassohn, The History and Sociology of Genocide, p. 58. Notably,
when Troy did finally fall, women and girl children were spared extermination, and instead
abducted as slaves (Israel Charny, ed., The Encyclopedia of Genocide [Santa Barbara, CA:
ABC-CLIO, 1999], p. 273). See the discussion of gender and genocide in Chapter 13.
4 Chalk and Jonassohn, The History and Sociology of Genocide, p. 28.
5 Helen Fein, Genocide: A Sociological Perspective (London: Sage, 1993), p. 26.
6 K. Armstrong, A History of God; quoted in Roy F. Baumeister, Evil: Inside Human Violence
and Cruelty (New York: W.H. Freeman), p. 171. “As a Jew,” writes Yehuda Bauer, “I
must live with the fact that the civilization I inherited...encompasses the call for
ORIGINS OF GENOCIDE
32
genocide in its canon.” Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 2001), p. 41. For other examples of Old Testament genocide, see Chalk and
Jonassohn, The History and Sociology of Genocide, pp. 62–63; Eric D. Weitz, A Century of
Genocide: Utopias of Race and Nation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003),
p. 18, citing Joshua’s “destruction by the edge of the sword [of] all in the city [of Jericho],
both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and donkeys.”
7 “Genocide, God, and the Bible,” http://stripe.colorado.edu/~morristo/genocide.html.
8 Cited in Louis W. Cable, “The Bloody Bible,” Freethought Today, June/July 1997.
http://www.ffrf.org/fttoday/june_july97/cable.html. See also the numerous examples
of “God-ordered genocide” cited in Bill Moyers, “9/11 and the Sport of God,”
Commondreams.org, 9 September 2005, http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0909-
36.htm.
9 Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust, p. 19.
10 Ben Kiernan, “The First Genocide: Carthage, 146
BC
,” Diogenes, 203 (2004), pp. 27–39.
11 Andrew Bell-Fialkoff writes that the First Crusade (1096–99) left “a trail of blood and
destruction, throughout the Rhine and the Moselle valleys, as well as in Prague and
Hungary. Entire communities, perhaps tens of thousands of people in all, were wiped
out. The Crusade culminated in a wholesale massacre of all non-Christians in Jerusalem.”
Bell-Fialkoff, Ethnic Cleansing (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1999), p. 13.
12 Eric S. Margolis, War at the Top of the World: The Struggle for Afghanistan, Kashmir, and
Tibet (New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 155.
13 See Reynald Secher, A French Genocide: The Vendée, trans. George Holoch (Notre Dame,
IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003). This section also draws on the analysis in
Adam Jones, “Why Gendercide? Why Root-and-Branch? A Comparison of the Vendée
Uprising of 1793–94 and the Bosnian War of the 1990s,” Journal of Genocide Research,
8: 1 (2006), pp. 9–25.
14 Cited in Alain Gérard, «Par principe d’humanité ...» La Terreur et la Vendée (Paris:
Librairie Arthème Fayard, 1999), p. 295.
15 Cited in Arno J. Mayer, The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian
Revolutions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 353.
16 In the estimation of France’s greatest historian, Jules Michelet; quoted in Mayer, The
Furies, p. 325.
17 Quoted in Secher, A French Genocide, p. 132.
18 Mayer, The Furies, p. 340.
19 Michael R. Mahoney, “The Zulu Kingdom as a Genocidal and Post-genocidal Society,
c. 1810 to the Present,” Journal of Genocide Research, 5: 2 (2003), p. 263.
20 Chalk and Jonassohn, The History and Sociology of Genocide, p. 223.
21 Chalk and Jonassohn, The History and Sociology of Genocide, pp. 224–25, citing Eugene
Victor Walter, Terror and Resistance: A Study of Political Violence.
22 Mahoney, “The Zulu Kingdom,” p. 254.
23 Chalk and Jonassohn, The History and Sociology of Genocide, pp. 224–25. Emphasis added.
24 Mahoney, “The Zulu Kingdom,” p. 255.
25 See PreventGenocide.org, “A Crime without a Name,” http://www.preventgenocide.org/
genocide/crimewithoutaname.htm.
26 Power herself describes Lemkin as a “wild-eyed professor with steel-rimmed glasses and
a relentless appetite for rejection.” Samantha Power, “A Problem from Hell”: America and
the Age of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 2002), p. 51.
27 The only other book that purports to examine Lemkin’s life and work turns out, upon
naive ordering, to be a mendacious Holocaust-denial tract. Lemkin’s unpublished
writings, including a global history of genocide, have long been in the hands of genocide
scholar Steven Jacobs, but have yet to see the light of day.
28 Power, “A Problem from Hell,” p. 20.
29 Lemkin quoted in Power, “A Problem from Hell,” p. 20.
30 Lemkin quoted in Power, “A Problem from Hell,” p. 21.
31 “Of particular interest to Lemkin were the reflections of George Eastman, who said he
ORIGINS OF GENOCIDE
33
had settled upon ‘Kodak’ as the name for his new camera because: ‘First. It is short.
Second. It is not capable of mispronunciation. Third. It does not resemble anything in
the art and cannot be associated with anything in the art except the Kodak.’” Power,
“A Problem from Hell,” pp. 42–43.
32 Lemkin cited in Steven L. Jacobs, “Indicting Henry Kissinger: The Response of Raphael
Lemkin,” in Adam Jones, ed., Genocide, War Crimes and the West: History and Complicity
(London: Zed Books, 2004), p. 217.
33 On this point, see Ward S. Churchill, “Genocide by Any Other Name: North American
Indian Residential Schools in Context,” in Jones, ed., Genocide, War Crimes and the West,
p. 80.
34 Stephen Holmes, “Looking Away,” London Review of Books, November 14, 2002 (review
of Power, “A Problem from Hell”).
35 According to Helen Fein, Lemkin’s “examples of genocide or genocidal situations include:
Albigensians, American Indians, Assyrians in Iraq, Belgian Congo, Christians in Japan,
French in Sicily (c. 1282), Hereros, Huguenots, Incas, Mongols, the Soviet Union/
Ukraine, [and] Tasmania.” Fein, Genocide: A Sociological Perspective, p. 11. Lemkin’s study
of Tasmania has now been edited for publication: see Raphael Lemkin, “Tasmania,” edited
by Ann Curthoys, Patterns of Prejudice, 39: 2 (2005), pp. 170–96 (and Curthoys’
Introduction, pp. 162–69).
36 William A. Schabas, Genocide in International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2000), p. 14.
37 As supplied in W. Michael Reisman and Chris T. Antoniou, eds, The Laws of War:
A Comprehensive Collection of Primary Documents on International Laws Governing Armed
Conflict (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), pp. 84–85.
38 Cited in Steven R. Ratner and Jason S. Abrams, Accountability for Human Rights Atrocities:
Beyond the Nuremberg Legacy (2nd edn) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 30,
32.
39 Schabas, Genocide in International Law, pp. 140, 175, 178.
40 For a survey of the early legal literature, see David Kader, “Law and Genocide: A Critical
Annotated Bibliography,” Hastings International and Comparative Law Review, 11
(1988).
41 Christopher Rudolph, “Constructing an Atrocities Regime: The Politics of War Crimes
Tribunals,” International Organization, 55: 3 (summer 2001), p. 659. Rudolph cites
Kenneth Abbott and Duncan Snidal, who “define ‘hard’ legalization as legally binding
obligations characterized by high degrees of obligation, precision, and delegation, and
define ‘soft’ legalization as a more flexible manifestation characterized by varying degrees
along one or most of these same dimensions.”
42 Irving Louis Horowitz, Taking Lives: Genocide and State Power (4th edn) (New Brunswick,
NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1996), p. 265.
43 Robert Gellately and Ben Kiernan, “The Study of Mass Murder and Genocide,” in
Gellately and Kiernan, eds, The Specter of Genocide: Mass Murder in Historical Perspective
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 15.
44 Schabas, Genocide in International Law, p. 254.
45 Alexander K.A. Greenawalt, “Rethinking Genocidal Intent: The Case for a Knowledge-
based Interpretation,” Columbia Law Review, 99: 8 (1999), p. 2269; emphasis added.
46 Akayesu judgment quoted in Schabas, Genocide in International Law, p. 212. Schabas
considers this approach “definitely inappropriate in the case of genocide.”
47 Reisman and Norchi quoted in Helen Fein, “Discriminating Genocide from War Crimes:
Vietnam and Afghanistan Reexamined,” Denver Journal of International Law and Policy,
22: 1 (1993), p. 58. Gellately and Kiernan likewise write that under the prevailing
international-legal understanding, “genocidal intent also applies to acts of destruction
that are not the specific goal but are predictable outcomes or by-products of a policy,
which could have been avoided by a change in that policy.” Gellately and Kiernan, “The
Study of Mass Murder and Genocide,” p. 15.
48 Alex Alvarez, Governments, Citizens, and Genocide: A Comparative and Interdisciplinary
ORIGINS OF GENOCIDE
34
Approach (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2001), p. 52.
“Gradations of culpability” for genocide can be usefully mapped onto domestic law’s
concept of “degrees” of homicide. This is the project of Ward Churchill in his “Proposed
Convention on Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.” Churchill
distinguishes among “(a) Genocide in the First Degree, which consists of instances in which
evidence of premeditated intent to commit genocide is present. (b) Genocide in the Second
Degree, which consists of instances in which evidence of premeditation is absent, but in
which it can be reasonably argued that the perpetrator(s) acted with reckless disregard for
the probability that genocide would result from their actions. (c) Genocide in the Third
Degree, which consists of instances in which genocide derives, however unintentionally,
from other violations of international law engaged in by the perpetrator(s). (d) Genocide
in the Fourth Degree, which consists of instances in which neither evidence of
premeditation nor other criminal behavior is present, but in which the perpetrator(s) acted
with depraved indifference to the possibility that genocide would result from their actions
and therefore [failed] to effect adequate safeguards to prevent it.” Churchill, A Little Matter
of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas, 1492 to the Present (San Francisco, CA:
City Lights Books, 1997), pp. 434–35.
49 Jay Winter, “Under Cover of War: The Armenian Genocide in the Context of Total
War,” in Gellately and Kiernan, eds, The Specter of Genocide, p. 194.
50 Spanish National Audience quoted in Schabas, Genocide in International Law, p. 150.
51 UN Secretariat quoted in Schabas, Genocide in International Law, p. 53. Leo Kuper’s
reference to “the destruction of human groups” is even more distilled, though it eliminates
intention; Leo Kuper, The Prevention of Genocide (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1985), p. 6.
52 In 1982, the Englishman Benjamin Whitaker was appointed Special Rapporteur by the
UN’s Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) to revise a previously commissioned
study on reform to the Genocide Convention. Whitaker’s report was submitted in 1985
and “made a number of innovative and controversial conclusions...Whitaker wanted
to amend the Convention in order to include political groups and groups based on sexual
orientation, to exclude the plea of superior orders, to extend the punishable acts to those
of ‘advertent omission’ and to pursue consideration of cultural genocide, ‘ethnocide’ and
‘ecocide’” (Schabas, Genocide in International Law, p. 467). Whitaker’s proposals
so divided his sponsors that his report was tabled and never acted upon – in my view,
an opportunity missed to substantially advance legal and scholarly understandings of
genocide.
53 For a superbly accessible introduction to the institution of Atlantic slavery, see Robert
Harms, The Diligent: A Voyage Through the Worlds of the Slave Trade (New York: Basic
Books, 2002).
54 After conducting a useful review of available sources, Matthew White concludes: “If we
assume the absolute worst, a death toll as high as 60 million is at the very edge of
possibility; however, the likeliest number of deaths would fall somewhere from 15 to 20
million.” White, “Twentieth Century Atlas – Historical Body Count,” http:// users.erols.
com/mwhite28/warstatv.htm. To arrive at such a total, one can begin with the figure of
eleven to fifteen million slaves “shipped between the fifteenth and the nineteenth century,”
cited in Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade: 1440–1870
(New York: Touchstone, 1997), p. 862. (Thomas himself argues for an “approximate
figure...[of] something like eleven million slaves, give or take 500,000.”) A widely held
view is that approximately 50 percent of those captured as slaves died before they were
shipped from West African ports. To these eleven to fifteen million victims, one adds
approximately two million more who died on the “middle passage” between Africa and
the Americas, and an unknown but certainly very large number who perished after arrival,
either during the brutal “seasoning” process or on the plantations.
55 Seymour Drescher, “The Atlantic Slave Trade and the Holocaust: A Comparative
Analysis,” in Alan S. Rosenbaum, ed., Is the Holocaust Unique? Perspectives on Comparative
Genocide (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2001), pp. 97–117.
ORIGINS OF GENOCIDE
35
56 Michael Ignatieff, “Lemkin’s Word,” The New Republic, February 26, 2001.
57 See, e.g., the Black American journalist Keith Richburg’s controversial article, “American
in Africa,” in Washington Post Magazine, March 26, 1995, available online at http://www.
washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/inatl/longterm/richburg/richbrg1.htm.
58 Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 164.
59 The fact that slavery in the United States was far less destructive of slaves’ lives, compared
to the Caribbean or Portuguese America (Brazil), is an important factor in weighing the
applicability of the genocide framework to different slavery institutions in the Americas.
Life for slaves in the US was a calvary; in French-controlled Haiti it was a holocaust.
Recall, however, that millions of slaves died en route to West African ports and New World
plantations. These rates do not seem to have been lower for slaves shipped to US
destinations.
60 Eric Langenbacher, “The Allies in World War II: The Anglo-American Bombardment
of German Cities,” in Jones, ed., Genocide, War Crimes and the West, pp. 117–19. See
also Howard Zinn, “Hiroshima and Royan,” in William L. Hewitt, ed., Defining the
Horrific: Readings on Genocide and Holocaust in the Twentieth Century (Upper Saddle
River, NJ: Pearson, 2004), pp. 187–99. Zinn, a renowned dissident historian, is also a
US veteran of the area-bombing campaign against Germany; the chapter relates some of
his personal experiences.
61 See the description of the raid in Eric Markusen and David Kopf, The Holocaust
and Strategic Bombing: Genocide and Total War in the Twentieth Century (Boulder,
CO: Westview Press, 1995), pp. 175–80.
62 “I cannot accept the view that . . . the bombing, in time of war, of such civilian enemy
populations as those of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Hamburg, and Dresden does not constitute
genocide within the terms of the [UN] convention.” Kuper, Genocide, cited in Chalk and
Jonassohn, The History and Sociology of Genocide, p. 24. Mary Kaldor also argues that “the
indiscriminate bombing of civilians...creat[ed] a scale of devastation of genocidal
proportions.” Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), p. 25.
63 “Was strategic bombing genocidal? Put bluntly, our answer is yes.” Markusen and Kopf,
The Holocaust and Strategic Bombing, p. 255; see the extended discussion at pp. 244–58.
64 Taylor quoted in Chalk and Jonassohn, The History and Sociology of Genocide, p. 25.
65 Ronald Takaki, Hiroshima: Why America Dropped the Atomic Bomb (Boston, MA: Little,
Brown, 1995), pp. 30, 153 (n.3).
66 See, e.g., Brahma Chellaney, “No Rationalization for Nagasaki Attack,” The Japan Times,
August 10, 2005, http://www.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/geted.pl5?eo2005 0810bc.htm.
67 See Ramsey Clark, “Criminal Complaint against the United States and Others for Crimes
against the People of Iraq (1996) and Letter to the Security Council (2001),” in Jones,
ed., Genocide, War Crimes and the West, p. 271. The forum in question was the
International Court on Crimes Against Humanity Committed by the UN Security
Council on [sic] Iraq, held on November 16–17, 1996. For more on citizens’ tribunals,
see Chapter 15. Clark’s phrase “for the purpose of” is not clearly supported by the
evidence; an accusation of genocide founded on willful and malignant negligence is, for
me, more persuasive.
68 For an argument along these lines, see John G. Heidenrich, How to Prevent Genocide: A
Guide for Policymakers, Scholars, and the Concerned Citizen (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001),
pp. 101–3.
69 Albright on 60 Minutes, May 12, 1996. She later disowned the comment.
70 Bonior quoted in “US Congressmen Criticise Iraqi Sanctions,” BBC Online, February
17, 2000, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/646783.stm.
71 Denis J. Halliday, “US Policy and Iraq: A Case of Genocide?,” in Jones, ed., Genocide,
War Crimes and the West, p. 264 (based on a November 1999 speech in Spain).
72 A useful definition of terrorism is offered by the US Congress: “any [criminal] activity
that . . . appears to be intended (i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; (ii) to
ORIGINS OF GENOCIDE
36
influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or (iii) to affect the
conduct of a government by assassination or kidnapping.” Quoted in Noam Chomsky,
9–11 (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2001), p. 16 (note).
73 For Kuper, genocidal massacres are “expressed characteristically in the annihilation of a
section of a group – men, women and children, as for example in the wiping out of whole
villages.” Kuper, Genocide, p. 10.
74 See the H-Genocide discussion logs for September 2001 at http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-
bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=lxandlist=H-Genocideanduser=andpw=andmonth=0109. The posts
cited here may be found in the archives for September 16 (Ronayne) and September 20,
2001 (Cribb).
75 Vandana Shiva, “War against Nature and the Peoples of the South,” in Sarah Anderson,
ed., Views from the South (San Francisco, CA: Food First Books, 2000), pp. 93, 113. See
also Paul Farmer, “On Suffering and Structural Violence: A View from Below,” in Nancy
Scheper-Hughes and Philippe Bourgois, eds, Violence in War and Peace (London:
Blackwell, 2004), pp. 281–89.
76 Ziegler quoted in “UN Expert Decries ‘Assassination’ By Hunger of Millions of Children,”
UN News Center, October 28, 2005. An assistant to Ziegler confirmed that the comments
were “directly translated from the French,” and added that in the past Ziegler had
described the “world order” as “murderous” (Sally-Anne Way, personal communication,
November 3, 2005). In a similar vein, Stephen Lewis, the UN Special Envoy for
HIV/AIDS in Africa, stated of the global AIDS crisis: “This pandemic cannot be allowed
to continue, and those who watch it unfold with a kind of pathological equanimity must
be held to account. There may yet come a day when we have peacetime tribunals to deal
with this particular version of crimes against humanity.” Lewis quoted in Michael Mann,
Incoherent Empire (London: Verso, 2005), p. 61.
77 Kal Holsti, personal communication, June 29, 2005.
78 See Henry Shue, Basic Rights: Subsistence, Affluence, and U.S. Foreign Policy (2nd edn)
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 207 (n. 17). I am citing Shue
somewhat out of context: his phrase refers to specific historical events during the Second
World War, when “over 6 million Asians were . . . allowed to starve” under colonial
(British and French) dominion. See also the discussion of imperial famines in Chapter 2.
In his study of Belgian genocide in the Congo (see Chapter 2), Martin Ewans also refers
to “genocide by neglect” in post-independence Africa, “with a massive, on-going loss of
life . . . being treated in Europe [and elsewhere] with near total indifference.” Evans,
European Atrocity, African Catastrophe: Leopold II, the Congo Free State and its Aftermath
(London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2002), p. 252.
79 Galtung quoted in Joseph Nevins, A Not-so-distant Horror: Mass Violence in East Timor
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), p. 191.
80 Sachs quoted in J. Tyrangiel, “Bono,” Time (Latin American edition), March 4, 2002.
Princeton professor Stephen F. Cohen has argued that the death toll exacted by the
“nihilistic zealotry” of proponents of “savage capitalism” was tens of millions in Russia alone
following the collapse of the Soviet Union: to US supporters of radical free-market policies
there, “the lost lives of perhaps 100 million Russians seem not to matter, only American
investments, loans, and reputations.” See Cohen, Failed Crusade: America and the Tragedy
of Post-communist Russia (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000), pp. 38, 50.
81 Holsti, personal communication, June 29, 2005.
82 Ervin Staub does ask “Is mass killing ever justified?,” but quickly answers in the negative,
and even rejects the notion that “genocides and mass killings [are] ever ‘rational’
expressions of self-interest.” Staub, The Roots of Evil: The Origins of Genocide and Other
Group Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 11–12.
83 For example, this comment by “a British observer” of the genocide against Herero and
Nama in German South West Africa (Chapter 3): “There can be no doubt, I think, that
the war has been of an almost unmixed benefit to the German colony. Two warlike races
have been exterminated, wells have been sunk, new water-holes discovered, the country
mapped and covered with telegraph lines, and an enormous amount of capital has been
ORIGINS OF GENOCIDE
37
laid out.” Quoted in Mark Levene, “Why Is the Twentieth Century the Century of
Genocide?,” Journal of World History, 11: 2 (2000), pp. 315–16.
84 C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution
(2nd rev. edn) (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), pp. 373–74. Emphasis added.
85 “Subaltern genocide” and “genocides by the oppressed” are terms that Nicholas Robins
and I deploy in a forthcoming edited volume, Genocides by the Oppressed: Genocides from
Below in Theory and Practice.
86 Martin Shaw writes: “Groups are always to some extent actors, participants in conflict,
as well as victims of it....Liberal humanitarianism often finds it easiest to represent
victim groups as pure victims – innocent civilian populations attacked by state or
paramilitary power. Thus the West sees Iraqi Kurds and Kosova Albanians only as helpless
civilians, not as groups that have supported political movements or guerrilla struggle.
. . . Armed groups may even carry out mutually genocidal war, against each others’
populations. In these situations, we need to recognize the complex patterns that make
groups – and often individuals – both participants and victims, at different times.” Shaw,
War and Genocide: Organized Killing in Modern Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003),
p. 187.
87 Schabas, Genocide in International Law, p. 341.
88 The terms “worthy” and “unworthy” victims are deployed by Edward S. Herman and
Noam Chomsky in Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New
York: Pantheon, 1988).
ORIGINS OF GENOCIDE
38
Imperialism, War,
and Social Revolution
■
IMPERIALISM AND COLONIALISM
It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale, and men going
at it blind....The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from
those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a
pretty thing when you look into it too much.
Marlow in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
Imperialism is “a policy undertaken by a state to directly control foreign economic,
physical, and cultural resources.”
1
Conquered territories and peoples may be incor-
porated into the state, as with the United Kingdom, United States, China, and the
former Soviet Union; or they may be held within the economic and/or political orbit
of the imperial power, while remaining nominally independent.
Imperialism is arguably as old as civilization. Contemporary usage has expanded
to include indirect forms of economic, political, and cultural control – hence, for
example, the popularity of the term “cultural imperialism.” However, in analyzing the
imperialism–genocide link, we will focus on the politico-military form of imperialism
known as colonialism.
Colonialism is “a specific form of imperialism involving the establishment and
maintenance, for an extended period of time, of rule over an alien people that is
separate from and subordinate to the ruling power.”
2
To understand how colonialism
is interwoven with genocide throughout history, let us distinguish three basic types:
settler colonialism, internal colonialism, and neo-colonialism.
39
CHAPTER 2
In settler colonialism, the metropolitan power encourages or dispatches colonists
to “settle” the territory. (In the British Empire, this marks the difference between
settler colonies such as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand; and India, where
a limited corps of 25,000 British administered a vast realm.) Settler colonialism
implies displacement and occupation of the land, and is often linked to genocide
against indigenous peoples (and genocidally tinged rebellions against colonialism)
(see Chapter 3).
Settler colonies may also be born of genocide and other repressive processes
close to the metropolitan country. The genocidal campaign against Ireland’s native
inhabitants from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, itself part of a process of settler
colonization (hence Northern Ireland), prompted the migration under massive duress
of millions of Irish to the British settler colonies and the United States. Likewise, the
repressive drive against “asocial” lower-class elements and political dissidents resulted
in the transportation of tens of thousands of prisoners to the penal colonies of
Australia.
3
The phenomenon of internal colonialism has received little attention in the
genocide literature, but its contemporary link to genocide is perhaps the strongest
of all colonial forms. A global “regime” of anti-colonialism, entrenched since the
1950s, today effectively bans interstate colonialism.
4
But internal colonialism – in
which core regions of a country control and exploit peripheral regions – continues
apace.
5
The greatest relevance of the concept is for genocide against indigenous
peoples in countries such as Brazil, Paraguay, and Guatemala. There, native people
occupy marginal positions both territorially and socially; their territories are coveted
by an expanding frontier of state control and settlement from the center. Profits flow
from periphery to core; the environment is ravaged. The result is the undermining
and dissolution, often the destruction, of native societies, accomplished by massacres,
selective killings, expulsions, coerced labor, disease, and alcoholism. Other examples
of internal colonialism that have led, or threatened to lead, to genocide are the
Chinese in Tibet (Box 3a); Russia in Chechnya (Box 7a); Indonesia in Aceh; and,
arguably, Sudan in the Darfur region (Box 9a).
Finally there is neo-colonialism – an ambiguous and contested concept, but a
useful one, I think. Under neo-colonialism, formal political rule is abandoned, and
the colonial flag lowered. But underlying structures of control – economic, political,
and cultural – remain. The resulting exploitation may have genocidal consequences,
but at one remove from formal colonialism. Many commentators consider structural
violence – that is, the violence inherent in social and economic structures – to reflect
neo-colonialism: the former colonial powers have maintained their hegemony over
the formerly colonized (“Third”) world, and immense disparities of wealth and well-
being remain as a result.
■
COLONIAL AND IMPERIAL GENOCIDES
The brief examination of genocide in classical and early modern times (Chapter 1)
showed how frequently genocide accompanied imperial expansion and colonialism.
In the modern era, the destruction of indigenous peoples has been a pervasive feature
IMPERIALISM, WAR, SOCIAL REVOLUTION
40
of these institutions. This is examined as a global phenomenon in Chapter 3. It
remains here to provide a brief overview of other cases of genocide, or borderline
genocide, under colonialism and imperialism.
Imperial famines
“Famine crimes” or “genocidal famines” have increasingly drawn the attention of
genocide scholars.
6
The most extensively studied cases are Stalin’s USSR (Chapter
5), Mao’s China, and Ethiopia under the Dergue regime. Recently the North Korean
case, in which up to two million people may have starved to death while the gov-
ernment remained inert, has sparked outrage.
7
The literature has focused strongly
on cases of famine under dictatorial and authoritarian regimes. Influenced by Nobel
Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen, who famously showed that “there has never
been a famine in a functioning multiparty democracy,”
8
this has produced ground-
breaking case studies such as Robert Conquest’s The Harvest of Sorrow (USSR) and
Jasper Becker’s Hungry Ghosts (China). The millions of dead in these catastrophes,
from starvation and disease, form a substantial part of the indictment of communist
regimes in the compendium, The Black Book of Communism.
9
However, a recent work by Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts, reminds us that
liberal orders have also been complicit in such crimes – extending far beyond the
notorious example of the Great Hunger in 1840s Ireland.
10
Davis’ subject is the epic
famines of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, linked both to nature
(the El Niño phenomenon) and state policy, which devastated peasant societies from
China to Brazil. He shares Sen’s conviction that famines are not blows of blind fate,
but “social crises that represent the failures of particular economic and political
systems.” Specifically, he asserts that “imperial policies towards starving ‘subjects’ were
often the exact moral equivalents of bombs dropped from 18,000 feet.”
India was largely free of famine under the Mogul emperors, but British colonial
administrators refused to follow the Mogul example of laying in sufficient emergency
stocks of grain. When famine struck, they imposed free-market policies that were
nothing more than a “mask for colonial genocide,” according to Davis. They con-
tinued ruinous collections of tax arrears, evincing greater concern for India’s balance
of payments than for “the holocaust in lives.” When the British did set up relief
camps, they took the form of work camps, which “provided less sustenance for hard
labor than the infamous Buchenwald concentration camp and less than half of the
modern caloric standard recommended for adult males by the Indian government.”
The death-toll in the famine of 1897–98 alone, including associated disease
epidemics, may have exceeded eleven million. “Twelve to 16 million was the death
toll commonly reported in the world press, which promptly nominated this the
‘famine of the century.’ This dismal title, however, was almost immediately usurped
by the even greater drought and deadlier famine of 1899–1902.” In 1901, the leading
British medical journal the Lancet suggested that “a conservative estimate of excess
mortality in India in the previous decade...was 19 million,” a total that “a number
of historians...have accepted . . . as an order-of-magnitude approximation for the
combined mortality of the 1896–1902 crisis.”
11
IMPERIALISM, WAR, SOCIAL REVOLUTION
41
Overall, Davis argues that market mechanisms imposed in colonial (e.g., India)
and neo-colonial contexts (e.g., China and Brazil) inflicted massive excess mortality.
“There is persuasive evidence that peasants and farm laborers became dramatically
more pregnable to natural disaster after 1850 as their local economies were violently
incorporated into the world market....Commercialization went hand in hand with
pauperization.”
12
He explicitly links colonial and neo-colonial relations to the eco-
nomic structures and policies that devastated once-thriving economies, and produced
the “Third World” of the post-colonial era.
The Congo “rubber terror”
Thanks to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, published early in the twentieth
century, the murderous exploitation of the Congo by Belgium’s King Leopold has
attained almost mythic status. However, not until the publication of Adam
Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost, at the end of the century, did contemporary
audiences come to appreciate the scale of the suffering and destruction inflicted on
the Congo, as well as the public outcry at the time that produced one of the first
truly international campaigns for human rights.
Conrad’s novella was based on a river voyage to the interior of the Congo, during
which he witnessed what he called “the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the
history of human conscience and geographical exploration.”
13
The territory that
became the sorely misnamed Congo Free State was, and still is, immense (see map
in Box 9a). In 1874, King Leopold commissioned British explorer Henry Stanley to
secure for the monarch a place in the imperial sun. By 1885, Leopold had established
the Congo as his personal fief, free of oversight from the Belgian parliament. Ivory
was the prize he first hungered for, then rubber as the pneumatic tire revolutionized
road travel. To muster the forced labor (corvée) needed to supply these goods, a reign
of terror was imposed on African populations.
The result was one of the most brutal and all-encompassing corvée institutions
the world has known. It led to “a death toll of Holocaust dimensions,” in Hochschild’s
estimation,
14
such that “Leopold’s African regime became a byword for exploitation
and genocide.”
15
Male rubber tappers and porters were mercilessly exploited and
driven to death. A Belgian politician, Edmond Picard, encountered a caravan of
conscripts:
Incessantly, we met these porters...black, miserable, their only clothing a
horrible dirty loincloth...most of them sickly, their strength sapped by
exhaustion and inadequate food, which consisted of a handful of rice and stinking
dried fish, pitiable walking caryatids . . . organised in a system of human transport,
requisitioned by the State with its irresistible force publique [militia], delivered by
chiefs whose slaves they are and who purloin their pay....Dying on the road or,
their journey ended, dying from the overwork in their villages.
16
The population collapse during the years of Leopold’s rule was astonishing.
Hochschild accepts the conclusions of a Belgian government commission that “the
IMPERIALISM, WAR, SOCIAL REVOLUTION
42
population of the territory had ‘been reduced by half’” under Belgian rule. “In 1924,”
he adds, “the population was reckoned at ten million, a figure confirmed by later
counts. This would mean, according to the estimates, that during the Leopold period
and its immediate aftermath the population of the territory dropped by approxi-
mately ten million people.”
17
During this time, the region was also swept by an
epidemic of sleeping sickness, “one of the most disastrous plagues recorded in
human history.”
18
However, as with indigenous peoples in other parts of the world,
the impact of disease was exacerbated by slavery and privation, and vice versa: “The
responsibility for this disaster is no less Leopold’s because it was a compound one.”
19
IMPERIALISM, WAR, SOCIAL REVOLUTION
43
Figure 2.1 Imperial genocide: the wealth of the Congo, gathered by forced labor, is siphoned off by Belgian King Leopold.
Source: Reprinted from Martin Ewans, European Atrocity, African Catastrophe. Original source unknown.
And the demographic data presented by Hochschild shows a shocking under-
representation of adult males in the Congolese population, indicating that outright
genocide claimed millions of lives.
20
“Sifting such figures today is like sifting the ruins
of an Auschwitz crematorium,” wrote Hochschild. “They do not tell you precise
death tolls, but they reek of mass murder.”
21
The only bright side to this, “one of the most appalling slaughters known to have
been brought about by human agency,”
22
was the launching of an international
protest movement, the Congo Reform Association, by a small handful of dedicated
individuals. They included Joseph Conrad, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – author of the
Sherlock Holmes stories – and Sir Roger Casement, an Irishman who would fall
before a British firing squad following the Easter Uprising of 1916. Utilizing modern
means of communication, the Association spread across the European continent and
to North America, dispatched observers to the Congo and published their findings.
23
All of this placed increased pressure on King Leopold to expose his territory to
outside oversight. Finally, in 1908, Leopold agreed to sell his enormous fief to the
Belgian government. Subsequent parliamentary monitoring appears to have substan-
tially reduced mortality, though the “rubber terror” only truly lapsed after the First
World War.
Belgium remained the colonial power in the territory until 1960, when it handed
over the Congo to a despotic but pro-Western military leader, Mobutu Sese Seko.
Early in the twenty-first century, the Congo is again torn apart by genocide, amidst
the most destructive military conflict since the Second World War – a grim echo of
the killing that rent the region under Leopold’s rule (see Box 9a).
The Japanese in East and Southeast Asia
Japanese imperialism, founded on invasions of Korea and Taiwan in the late
nineteenth century, grew by leaps and bounds under the military regime established
during the 1930s. Domestic persecution of communists and other political
opponents was combined with an aggressively expansionist agenda. In 1931, the
Japanese invaded the mineral-rich Chinese region of Manchuria, setting up the
puppet state of Manchukuo the following year.
In 1937, Japan effectively launched the Second World War, mounting a full-scale
invasion of China’s eastern seaboard and key interior points. The campaign featured
air attacks that killed tens of thousands of civilians, and even more intensive atrocities
at ground level. The occupation of the Chinese capital, Nanjing, in December 1937
became a global byword for war crimes. The gendercidal slaughter of as many
as 200,000 Chinese men of “battle age” was accompanied by the rape of tens of
thousands of children and women (see Chapter 13). Over the course of the Japanese
occupation (1937–45), “nearly 2,600,000 unarmed Chinese civilians” were killed,
together with half a million to one million prisoners of war.
24
In December 1941, Japan coordinated its surprise attack on the US Pacific
Fleet at Pearl Harbor with a lightning invasion of Southeast Asia. This brought the
Philippines, Malaya (peninsular Malaysia), Singapore, and Indonesia under its direct
rule. (Satellite control was established in Indochina, in collusion with the Vichy
IMPERIALISM, WAR, SOCIAL REVOLUTION
44
French regime.) Large-scale summary killings of civilians, death marches of Asian and
European populations, and atrocities against Allied prisoners-of-war all figured in
the postwar war-crimes trials (Chapter 15). Also well known is the regime of corvée
labor, one of the worst in modern history, imposed throughout the occupied
territories. Not only did the notorious Burma–Thailand railroad kill 16,000 of the
46–50,000 Allied prisoners forced to work on it, but “as many as 100,000 of the
120,000 to 150,000 Asian forced laborers may have died, or 83 percent.”
25
A network
of trafficking of Asian women for prostitution (the so-called “comfort women”)
formed an integral part of this forced-labor system. Regionwide, the death-toll
of corvée laborers probably approached, or even exceeded, one million. Both the
“comfort women” and male forced laborers have in recent years petitioned the
Japanese government for acknowledgment and material compensation, with some
success.
26
Like their Nazi counterparts, the Japanese believed themselves superior beings.
Subject races were not considered “subhuman” in the Nazi manner, but they were
clearly inferior, and were usually assigned a helot status in the “Greater Asian Co-
Prosperity Sphere.” Japanese fantasies of racial supremacy also led to a Nazi-style
preoccupation with genocidal technology, reflected most notably in the biological
warfare program and gruesome medical experiments. The notorious Unit 731
in occupied Manchuria produced chemical and biological weapons that were tested
on prisoners-of-war and civilian populations, and deployed throughout the war
theater. In China alone, according to Yuki Tanaka,
In Zhejiang province, biological weapons were used six times between September
18 and October 7, 1940. . . . Around the same time 270 kilograms of typhoid,
paratyphoid, cholera, and plague bacteria were sent to Nanjing and central China
for use by Japanese battalions on the battlefield....After the outbreak of World
War II, the Japanese continued to use biological weapons against the Chinese.
They sprayed cholera, typhoid, plague, and dysentery pathogens in the Jinhua
area of Zhejiang province in June and July 1942....It is [also] well known that
Unit 731 used large numbers of Chinese people for experiments. Many Chinese
who rebelled against the Japanese occupation were arrested and sent to Pingfan
where they became guinea pigs for Unit 731....When they were being experi-
mented on, the [subjects] were transferred from the main prison to individual cells
where they were infected with particular pathogens by such means as injections
or being given contaminated food or water....After succumbing to the disease,
the prisoners were usually dissected, and their bodies were then cremated within
the compound.
27
In an ironic outcome from which Nazi scientists also benefited, after the Second
World War the participants in Unit 731 atrocities were granted immunity from
prosecution – so long as they shared their knowledge of chemical and biological
warfare, and the results of their atrocious experiments, with US authorities (see
Chapter 15).
28
IMPERIALISM, WAR, SOCIAL REVOLUTION
45
The US in Indochina
With the possible exception of the French war to retain Algeria (1958–62),
no imperial intervention in the twentieth century provoked as much dissent and
political upheaval in the colonial power as the US’s long war in Vietnam. A bloody
attempt by France in 1945–54 to reconquer a jewel in the colonial crown was defeated
by a nationalist guerrilla movement under Ho Chi Minh and his military com-
mander, Vo Nguyen Giap. The country was divided between the nationalist North
and a US client regime in the South. Under the Geneva agreements of 1954, this
was supposed to be temporary, but recognizing the inevitable victory of Ho in
nationwide elections, scheduled for 1956, the South Vietnam regime under Ngo
Diem refused to hold them. After 1961, the US stepped up direct military inter-
vention. In 1965, hundreds of thousands of US troops invaded to combat the South
Vietnamese guerrillas (Viet Cong), as well as regular forces infiltrating down the “Ho
Chi Minh Trail” from North Vietnam.
About seven million tons of bombs and other munitions were dropped on North
and (especially) South Vietnam during the course of the war. This was more than was
dropped by all countries in all theaters of the Second World War. The bombing was
combined with the creation of a network of “model villages” in the South Vietnamese
countryside, kept under close US and South Vietnamese military observation. Large
swathes of the countryside were then designated “free-fire zones,” in which any living
being could be targeted.
In 1970, US President Nixon widened the war, stepping up the “secret” bombing
of neighboring Cambodia, where B-52 raids fueled the rise of the genocidal Khmer
Rouge (Chapter 7). Sections of Laos, notably the Plain of Jars, were turned by
saturation bombing into dead zones, the inhabitants obliterated or terrorized into
flight. The bombing continued until 1973, when a peace agreement was signed and
most US soldiers withdrew. Two years later, North Vietnamese forces dealt a death
blow to the corrupt military regime in the South, with a final offensive that turned
into a rout.
The human cost of the war to the United States was some 58,000 soldiers killed,
but in Indochina, the toll was catastrophic. Somewhere between two million and
five million Indochinese died, mostly at the hands of the US and its allies. In addition,
“a historically unprecedented level of chemical warfare,” aimed mostly at defoliating
the countryside of forest cover in which guerrilla forces could hide, poisoned the
soil and foodchain. “The lingering effects of chemical warfare poisoning continue
to plague the health of adult Vietnamese (and ex-GIs) while causing increased birth
defects. Samples of soil, water, food and body fat of Vietnamese continue to the
present day to reveal dangerously elevated levels of dioxin.” An estimated “3.5 million
landmines and 300,000 tons of unexploded ordnance” still litter the countryside,
killing “several thousand” Vietnamese every year – at least 40,000 since the war ended
in 1975.
29
The widespread international revulsion that the war evoked led to the creation,
in 1966, of an International War Crimes Tribunal under the aegis of the British
philosopher Bertrand Russell. The Russell Tribunal panelists were “unanimous in
finding the US guilty for using illegal weapons, maltreating prisoners of war and
IMPERIALISM, WAR, SOCIAL REVOLUTION
46
civilians, and aggressing against Laos.” Most controversially, “there was a unanimous
vote of guilty on the genocide charge.”
30
A leading figure in this “citizens’ tribunal”
(see Chapter 15) was the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, who took the
opportunity to write “On Genocide,” a seminal essay on the theory and practice
of genocide. Sartre advanced a cogent if controversial case for labeling US actions in
Indochina genocidal. Those fighting the war, he alleged, were “living out the only
possible relationship between an overindustrialized country and an underdeveloped
country, that is to say, a genocidal relationship implemented through racism.”
31
Pioneering genocide scholar Leo Kuper joined Sartre in calling the war genocidal,
as did prima facie the noted theorist of human rights and international law, Richard
Falk.
32
The Soviets in Afghanistan
Soviet imperialism in Afghanistan extended the historic Russian drive for influence
and control along the periphery of the empire. Severely mauled by the Nazi invasion
in the Second World War, the Soviets established harshly authoritarian police states
in Eastern Europe, with tentative forays beyond, notably in Asia and Africa.
Within the empire, strategies of governance varied. In Central and Eastern Europe,
with the exception of postwar East Germany and the Hungarian uprising of 1956
(in which some 25,000 died), Soviet imperial power did not produce large-scale
killing. Afghanistan was different. Years of growing Soviet influence culminated in
the establishment of a Soviet client government in Kabul in April 1978. In 1979, a
reign of terror inflicted by President Hafizullah Amin further destabilized Afghan
society. Finally, in December 1979, 25,000 Soviet troops invaded to “restore stability.”
Amin, who had outlived his usefulness, was killed in the first hours of the invasion,
and replaced by a more compliant Soviet proxy, Babrak Karmal. Occupying forces
rapidly swelled to 100,000.
The occupation spawned an initially ragtag but, with US assistance, increasingly
coherent Islamist-nationalist resistance, the mujahedin. (Ironically, they included
some of the same figures who would later wage holy war against the West, including
on 9/11. Osama bin Laden began his terrorist trajectory as a foreign volunteer with
the mujahedin.) The Soviets responded ruthlessly. In “a ferocious scorched-earth
campaign that combined the merciless destructiveness of Genghis Khan’s Mongols
with the calculated terrorism of Stalin,”
33
the Soviets inflicted massive civilian destruc-
tion, recalling the worst US actions in Indochina. “The number of dead is extremely
hard to determine, but most observers agree that the war took between 1.5 million
and 2 million lives, 90 percent of whom were civilians.”
34
Some five million Afghans
fled to Pakistan and Iran – one of the largest refugee flows in history.
35
The Afghanistan–Vietnam comparison has often been made, sometimes with
attention to alleged differences between the two. In a well-known article for the
Denver Journal of International Law and Policy, sociologist Helen Fein undertook
to examine whether either or both cases constituted genocide. Her verdict on
Vietnam was that while “repeated and substantive charges of war crimes...appear
well-founded,” the charge of “genocide...simply [is] not supported by the acts
IMPERIALISM, WAR, SOCIAL REVOLUTION
47
cited.” In the Soviet case, however, Fein catalogued “repeated and substantive charges
of ‘depopulation,’ massacre, deliberate injury, forced transfer of the children of
Afghanis, and occasional charges of genocide.” Combined, they “sustain[ed] a prima
facie charge of genocide as well as charges of war crimes.”
36
One may disagree with the gentler judgment about US conduct in Indochina
(which featured bombing on a scale and of an intensity never matched in Afghanistan,
for example). But it is hard to dispute the validity of the genocide framework for this
instance of Soviet imperialism. It may have killed upwards of a million-and-a-half
Afghanis, before Islamist resistance and internal collapse forced a withdrawal of Soviet
forces in 1989.
A note on genocide and imperial dissolution
Before moving on, it is important to note the close correlation between imperial dis-
solution – generally accompanied and spawned by the rise of movements of national
liberation – and outbreaks of mass violence, including genocide. The combination
of fear, insecurity, and humiliation (see Chapter 11) that afflicts imperial powers
during epochs of decline, set against a backdrop of insurgent peoples and nations
seeking to hasten that decline, frequently produces violence comparable to that of
empires in their insurgent and expansionist phase. A classic example is the Ottoman
Empire’s lashing out at Armenians and other minorities as the “sick man of Europe”
stumbled towards its demise (Chapter 4). Another case analyzed in this volume is
post-Soviet Russia’s genocidal targeting of Chechen secessionists (Box 5a). To these
instances may be added France’s massively destructive war in Algeria (1958–62),
Britain’s brutal counter-insurgency against the Kikuyu uprising in Kenya in the early
1950s,
37
and Portugal’s struggle to retain its African colonies of Mozambique, Angola,
and Guinea-Bissau in the 1960s and 1970s.
■
GENOCIDE AND WAR
If imperialism and genocide are closely related, war and genocide are the Siamese
twins of history.
38
The conjoining of the two is evident from the twentieth century
alone. All three of the century’s “classic” genocides – against Armenians in Turkey,
Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe, and Tutsis in Rwanda – occurred in a context of civil
and/or international war. The wartime context is only a necessary, not a sufficient,
explanation; but as Christopher Fettweis asks of the Jewish Holocaust, “Should one
be surprised that the most destructive war in history was accompanied by one of the
most dramatic instances of violence against civilians?”
39
A perceptive scholar of the
relationship, Martin Shaw, considers genocide to be an offshoot of “degenerate”
warfare, with its large-scale targeting of civilian populations.
40
The line between “legitimate” war and genocide is probably the hardest to draw
in the entire field of genocide studies. But most scholars would now acknowledge
intimate connections between the two, and many would rank war as genocide’s
greatest single enabling factor.
IMPERIALISM, WAR, SOCIAL REVOLUTION
48
What are the points of connection between war and genocide?
• War accustoms a society to a pervasive climate of violence. Large portions of the
male population may be drawn into institutions, the prime purpose of which is
to inflict violence upon designated enemies. Much of the remaining population
is cast in various productive and reproductive roles. Nearly all adults are therefore
complicit in the war machine. The boundaries between legality and criminality
erode. Psychological and social inhibitions diminish, often to be replaced by
blood-lust.
• War greatly increases the quotient of fear and hatred in a society. “War creates
a type of mass psychosis to which societies at peace cannot relate.”
41
Both
soldiers and civilians live in dread of death. Propaganda emphasizes the “traitor
within.” Fear fuels hatred of the one causing the fear, and dependence on the
authority that pledges deliverance from the threat. The ideology of militarism
inculcates “a condition of slavish docility” and “stolid passivity” throughout
the militarized society.
42
Societies grow more receptive to state vigilance and
violence, as well as to suspensions of legal and constitutional safeguards.
Dissidence threatens unity and stability, and provokes widespread loathing and
repression.
• War eases genocidal logistics. With the unified command of society and economy,
it is easier to mobilize resources for genocide. State power is increasingly devoted
to inflicting mass violence. (Indeed, the state itself, “evolving as it did within the
crucible of endless rounds of combat, served initially as a more efficient apparatus
to fight wars.”)
43
For example, the wartime marshalling of rail and freight
infrastructure was essential to the “efficient” extermination of millions of Jews,
and others, in the Nazi death camps. Much of that infrastructure was built and/or
maintained by forced laborers captured as spoils, another regular phenomenon
in wartime.
• War provides a smokescreen for genocide.
44
“That’s war” becomes the excuse for
campaigns of extermination. Traditional sources of information, communication,
and denunciation are foreclosed or rigidly controlled. “Journalism is highly
restricted, and military censorship prevents the investigation of reported
atrocities. The minds of nations and of the international community are on other
issues in time of war.”
45
• War fuels intracommunal solidarity and intercommunal enmity. Many who
experienced the wars of the twentieth century (if they survived) recalled them
with mingled pain and pleasure. Few had ever before considered themselves
citizens swept up in a common cause. Most soldiers experienced “a new kind of
community held together by common danger and a common goal,”
46
which
forged the most enduring friendships of their lives. In general, war “exaggerates
nationalistic impulses as populations come together under outside threats. . . .
During conflict group identities are strengthened as the gap between ‘us’ and
‘them’ is magnified, and individuals increasingly emphasize their solidarity
with the threatened group.”
47
As David Barash puts it concisely: “In enmity,
there is unity”
48
(see also chapters 11, 12, 17). “What is France if not as defined
against England or Germany? What is Serbia if not as defined against Germany
IMPERIALISM, WAR, SOCIAL REVOLUTION
49
or Croatia?”
49
Solidarity may coalesce around a dominant ethnicity within the
society, prompting the anathematizing of Other-identified minorities.
• War magnifies humanitarian crisis. Refugee flows – whether of internally or
internationally displaced peoples – may destabilize the society at war, and others
around it. War complicates or prevents the provision of humanitarian assistance.
Millions may starve to death beyond the reach of aid agencies, as in Congo’s messy
and multifaceted wars (Box 9a). “New wars” (see Chapter 12) may come to feed
on war-related humanitarian assistance, which can also buttress genocidally
inclined state authorities, as in Rwanda in the early 1990s.
50
• War stokes grievances and a desire for revenge. One does not need to adhere to
the “ancient conflict” model of the Balkans wars to accept that manipulative
politicians had plenty to manipulate. Large numbers of Serbs were spurred
by the collective memory of genocide against Serbs during the Second World
War to support Slobodan Milosevic’s ultranationalist option. Fewer Germans
would have supported Hitler or the Nazis without an abiding sense of grievance
generated by the harsh Versailles Treaty imposed on Germany in 1919. The
Khmer Rouge in Cambodia would have enjoyed less popular support if years of
American bombing had not driven much of the country’s peasant population half-
mad with terror and rage.
It would be comforting to think that democratic societies are immune to these
responses. Comforting, but unwise. When a liberal society is under stress, it is all
too easy for it to slide towards genocide. I was reminded of this in the wake of the
May 2004 execution, by slow decapitation, of an American hostage in Iraq, Nick
Berg. Berg’s killing was captured on video and posted to the Internet (where servers
carrying it promptly crashed, overloaded by morbid demand). Lifting the Internet
rug after Berg’s killing exposed a brazenly genocidal discourse, as with the following
statements posted by a popular right-wing blog (weblog) in the US:
Kill them. Kill every last motherfucking one of them and anybody carrying as
much as a quarter of an ounce of sympathy for them. No quarter, no prisoners,
no mercy.
. . . These degenerate pieces of filth must be eradicated.
These subhuman slime don’t deserve to live. Any second that they’re granted
on this planet from now on is a crime of omission on our part, as far as I’m
concerned.
[I] feel that this culture, this people need to be removed the way a cancer is
removed from a healthy body. . . . Tell me, what do they offer humanity? What
right do they have to continue to be a growing threat to the life, safety, and security
of everyone else on Earth?
It’s time to solve this problem the way the Romans solved Carthage, from Libya
to Pakistan. First, however, we should round up the leftists here in America and
IMPERIALISM, WAR, SOCIAL REVOLUTION
50
give them a choice. Stand with America or with the Islamofacists [sic]. Deport
those who hate America and then kill every living thing.
The terrorists hide behind their little rags and shout jihad [“holy war”]! I say it’s
time to shout CRUSADE!
...I’d personally give the order to kill a billion Muslims tomorrow if that’s what
it took to insure my children’s future. Sorry if that’s too harsh, but shitty being
them. They started it.
51
These examples are repellent, and I apologize to Muslim readers for citing them; but
it is necessary to remind ourselves of the genocidal potential that exists in all human
societies. The comments are representative and generic
52
– there is nothing uniquely
American about them. They are not even especially sadistic, compared to other
examples that might have been chosen from the same website. Some have a timeless
air, reminiscent of the proclamations of Assyrian kings or Mongol emperors as they
prepared to embark on genocidal war and empire-building. (Note the passing
references to classical precedents – Carthage, the Crusades.)
But if something in war’s extremism is timeless, something is also distinctively
modern, and this merits exploration.
The First World War and the dawn of industrial death
In July 1916, my grandfather, Alfred George Jones (1885–1949), a British volunteer
soldier, arrived on the Somme farmlands of the western front in France. This terrain
had just witnessed the most massive and disastrous Allied offensive of the First World
War. On July 1, commemorated ever since as the “Black Day” of the British Army,
an offensive by 100,000 Allied troops produced 60,000 casualties in a single day,
including 20,000 killed. The image of British troops walking at a parade-ground pace,
bayonets fixed, across the gently rolling landscapes of the Somme, and directly into
withering German machine-gun fire, has become iconic in modern times: “the
Somme marked the end of an age of vital optimism in British life that has never been
recovered”
53
(see Figure 2.2).
My grandfather was thrown into the meat-grinder that followed, which claimed
630,000 Allied casualties and a similar number of Germans over four-and-a-half
months. A sapper in the Royal Engineers, he was blown up and buried for three days
by an artillery shell in “no man’s land” (a term that has since become a metaphor of
the cultural dislocation wrought by the First World War). He was discovered only
by chance. Carried to the rear and shell-shocked, he was shipped back to England
to convalesce. The experience triggered epileptic attacks that haunted him to the end
of his days; but he survived to father my father. Thus, for better or worse, you hold
this book in your hands because someone stumbled across my grandfather in no man’s
land ninety years ago, during the definitive war of modern times.
54
The crisis caused by the “Great War,” above all other conflicts in the Western
experience, derived from a combination of industrial technology and physical
IMPERIALISM, WAR, SOCIAL REVOLUTION
51
paralysis. As millions of tons of munitions were unleashed, soldiers took refuge in
fragile trenches that shook or collapsed from the bombardments, and that between
assaults were a surreal wasteland of mud, rats, and corpses. Ten million soldiers died
on all sides – a previously unimaginable figure, and one that left a gaping and
traumatic hole where a generation of young European men should have been. For
Martin Shaw,
The slaughter of the trenches was in many ways the definitive experience of
modern mass killing, seminal to virtually all the mass killing activities of the twen-
tieth century. The massacre of conscripts was a starting-point for the development
of each of the other strands. As the soldier-victims were mown down in their
hundreds of thousands in the Somme and elsewhere, they provided a spectacle of
mass death that set the tone for a century....All the main paradigms of twentieth-
century death were already visible in this first great phase of total war.
55
Adolf Hitler spent four years in the trenches of the western front. He had been swept
up in nationalist euphoria at the war’s outbreak – there is a famous photograph of a
IMPERIALISM, WAR, SOCIAL REVOLUTION
52
Figure 2.2 An iconic image of the twentieth century: soldiers go “over the top” at the Battle of the Somme, July 1916.
Source: Imperial War Museum.
Berlin crowd celebrating the declaration of war, in which Hitler’s face may be seen,
rapt with enthusiasm. As a soldier, he fought bravely, receiving the Iron Cross Second
Class. He was nearly killed in a gas attack that left him blind and hospitalized – the
prone, powerless position in which he first heard of the “humiliating” armistice
Germany had accepted. (For more on genocide and humiliation, see Chapter 10.)
In the war’s aftermath, Hitler joined millions of demobilized soldiers struggling to
find a place in postwar society. His war-fueled alienation, and his nostalgic longing
for the solidarity and comradeship of the trenches, marked him for life.
The Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, which spawned large-scale killing under
Vladimir Lenin and epic slaughter under Joseph Stalin (Chapter 5), is inconceivable
without the trauma of the war. The conflict also directly sparked the first well-known
genocide of the twentieth century. The Ottoman Turks’ exterminatory assault on the
Armenian population of the empire killed over a million people, the vast majority
of them defenseless (see Chapter 4). The genocide was carried out on the grounds
of military “self-defense” against an ethnic group accused of seeking to subvert the
Ottoman state, in alliance with a historic enemy (Russia). Genocidal logistics,
particularly in terms of transport, were greatly facilitated by the requisites of wartime
emergency.
The Second World War and the “barbarization of warfare”
The European theater of the Second World War consisted of two quite different
conflicts. In the West, Nazi occupation authorities were generally more disciplined
and less brutal, though this did not pertain where round-ups of Jews were concerned.
In the occupied territories of the east, and in the Balkans to the south, crimes against
humanity were the norm. Genocide featured prominently among them.
The heart of the eastern war was the struggle between invading German forces and
the Soviet people.
56
Soviet armies were dealt a massive blow by the German blitzkrieg
(lightning-war) of June to December 1941, which pushed all the way to the suburbs
of Moscow. There ensued a titanic struggle between two totalitarian systems – the
most massive and destructive military conflict in history. For Hitler, it was from the
start “an ideological war of extermination and enslavement”:
its goal was to wipe out the Soviet state, to enslave the Russian people after
debilitating them by famine and all other forms of deprivation, systematically to
murder all “biological” and political enemies of Nazism, such as the Jews, the
Gypsies [Roma], members of the Communist Party, intellectuals, and so forth, and
finally to turn western Russia into a German paradise of “Aryan” colonizers served
by hordes of Slav helots.
57
Reflecting this racial animus and political extremism, the restraints that generally
governed German troops in the West – the preservation of prisoners-of-war, a degree
of respect for civilian lives and property – were abandoned from the outset. “This
struggle must have as its aim the demolition of present Russia and must therefore be
conducted with unprecedented severity,” declared Panzer Group Colonel-General
IMPERIALISM, WAR, SOCIAL REVOLUTION
53
Hoepner before the invasion. “Both the planning and the execution of every battle
must be dictated by an iron will to bring about a merciless, total annihilation of the
enemy. Particularly no mercy should be shown toward the carriers of the present
Russian-Bolshevik system.”
58
The result was a “demodernization” of the eastern front from 1941 to 1945, and
a concomitant “barbarization of warfare.” The terms belong to Omer Bartov, who
more than any other scholar has portrayed the disintegration of norms and person-
alities among the German Wehrmacht (see especially his short but provocative book,
Hitler’s Army). Amidst physical travails, primitive conditions, and endless harassment
by partisans, troops turned readily to atrocity. They were granted a “license to murder
disarmed soldiers and defenseless civilians,” and often carried out the task with an
indiscriminate enthusiasm that transported them beyond the limited controls
established by the army.
The Soviet stance towards the German invader could also be blood-curdling. The
poet Ilya Ehrenburg penned a leaflet for circulation among Soviet frontline troops
titled simply, “Kill”:
The Germans are not human beings. From now on the word “German” is for us
the worst imaginable curse. From now on the word “German” strikes us to the
quick. We shall not get excited. We shall kill. If you have not killed at least one
German a day, you have wasted that day....If you cannot kill your German with
a bullet, kill him with your bayonet. If there is calm on your part of the front, or
if you are waiting for the fighting, kill a German in the meantime....If you kill
one German, kill another – for us there is nothing more joyful than a heap of
German corpses.
59
Thus conditioned, when Soviet troops reached German soil in East Prussia they
unleashed a campaign of mass rape, murder, and terror against German civilians, who
were disproportionately children and women. The campaign of gang rape, which
Stalin notoriously dismissed as the Soviet soldier “having fun with a woman,” is seared
particularly into the German collective memory.
60
As many as two million German
women were attacked: “it was not untypical for Soviet troops to rape every female
over the age of twelve or thirteen in a village, killing many in the process.”
61
However,
whatever else may be said, Soviet ideology lacked a strong racist component. Perhaps
as a result, after months of rape and killing, the regime that was finally imposed on
the Soviet satellite state of East Germany was less malevolent than anything the Slavs
had experienced under Nazi rule.
A trend of barbarization was also evident in the war in the Pacific, which pitted
the US, UK, and China against Japanese occupation forces. In his classic War Without
Mercy, John Dower examined the processes of mutual demonization and bestial-
ization by the US and Japanese polities. These processes both conditioned and
reflected the broader popular hostility in wartime. The American public’s view of
the Japanese enemy was conveyed in a poll taken in December 1944, in which,
according to Gary Bass, “33 percent of Americans wanted to destroy Japan as a
country after the war, 28 percent wanted to supervise and control Japan – and fully
13 percent wanted to kill all Japanese people.”
62
IMPERIALISM, WAR, SOCIAL REVOLUTION
54
Genocide and social revolution
It is on a blank page that the most beautiful poems are written.
Mao Zedong, Chinese revolutionary leader
Revolutions are sudden, far-reaching, and generally violent transformations in the
political order. Social revolutions, which go beyond a change of political regime
to encompass transformations of the underlying class structure, are particularly
wrenching.
Beginning with the English Civil War of 1648, the American Revolution of 1776,
and the French Revolution of 1789, the modern era has witnessed an escalating series
of such transformations. Revolution has been closely linked to struggles for national
independence, as well as to attempts to engineer fundamental changes in the social
order. The uprisings against the crumbling Ottoman Empire in the early twentieth
century provided the template for the century’s national liberation struggles. These
coalesced as a comprehensive movement for decolonization following the Second
World War.
The Soviet Revolution of 1917, which grew out of the chaos and privation of the
First World War on the eastern front, epitomized the Marxist–Leninist variant of
social-revolutionary strategy. This viewed “all history [as] the history of class struggle”
(to cite Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto). Under the influence of Soviet
revolutionary V.I. Lenin, it stressed the role of a vanguard party to drag the workers
and peasants to liberation, kicking and screaming if necessary (as proved to be the
case).
63
Social-revolutionary struggle in the early part of the twentieth century also
took a fascist form, as in Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany.
64
Fascism found its
shock troops among workers and the lumpenproletariat (lower social orders and riff-
raff). Its peasant following was also considerable. But its social base resided more in
the lower-middle class, and featured an alliance – or marriage of convenience – with
traditional, conservative sectors.
Both communist and fascist variants of revolution are highly militarized. This
reflects the clandestine organizing and cell-based struggle of revolutionary strategy,
as well as the need to crush counter-revolutionary opposition before, during, and after
the revolution. It also attests to the conviction of some revolutionaries that the world
should share in their victory, or be subjugated by it. As Martin Shaw notes,
revolution itself . . . increasingly took the form of war, particularly guerrilla war....
Revolutionaries pursued armed struggle not as a conclusion to political struggle,
but as a central means of that struggle from the outset. Likewise, established power
has used force not merely to defeat open insurrection, but to stamp out revolu-
tionary forces and terrorize their actual or potential social supporters. As revolution
became armed struggle, counter-revolution became counter-insurgency. In this
sense there has been a radical change in the character of many revolutionary
processes.
65
Research into the Turkish and Nazi revolutions produced one of the key works of
comparative genocide studies, Robert Melson’s Revolution and Genocide (1996),
which summarizes the linkage as follows:
IMPERIALISM, WAR, SOCIAL REVOLUTION
55
1. Revolutions created the conditions for genocidal movements to come to power.
2. Revolutions made possible the imposition of radical ideologies and new orders
that legitimated genocide.
3. The social mobilization of low status or despised groups [e.g., in struggles for
national liberation] helped to make them targets of genocide.
4. Revolutions leading to wars facilitated the implementation of genocide as a policy
of the state.
66
But while revolution, especially social revolution, may take a genocidal form, so
too may counter-revolution. This book contains numerous instances of revolutions
that spawned genocides (Turkey’s against the Armenians, Lenin’s and Stalin’s terrors,
the Nazis, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, “Hutu Power” in Rwanda). But it includes
even more cases in which colonial and contemporary state authorities sought to stamp
out “revolutionary” threats through genocide. The Germans in Southwest Africa, the
Chinese in Tibet, West Pakistan in East Pakistan/Bangladesh, Iraq versus the Kurds,
Serbia in Kosovo, Russia in Chechnya, and Sudan in Darfur – all fit the pattern, as
does the Guatemalan army’s rampage against Mayan Indians in the 1970s and 1980s
(see Chapter 3). In all cases, once war is unleashed, the radicalization and extremism
of organized mass violence, described previously, come to dominate the equation.
The nuclear revolution and “omnicide”
Total war is no longer only between all members of one national community and
all those of another: it is also total because it will very likely set the whole world up in
flames.
Jean-Paul Sartre
As revolutions in the social and political sphere represent dramatic irruptions
of new actors and social forces, so technological revolutions transform the world
and human history. This was the case prior to the First World War, when scientific
knowledge, wedded to an industrial base, facilitated the unprecedented mass
slaughter of 1914–18. An even more portentous transformation was the nuclear
revolution – the discovery that the splitting (and later the fusion) of atoms could
unleash unprecedented energy, and could be directed towards military destruction
as well as peaceful ends. Atomic bombs had the power to render conventional
weapons obsolete, while “the destructive power of the hydrogen bomb was as
revolutionary in comparison with the atomic bomb as was the latter to conventional
weaponry.”
67
The invention of nuclear weapons, first (and fortunately last) used in war at
Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, transformed civilization to its very roots.
“In a real way we all lead something of a ‘double life,’” wrote Robert Jay Lifton and
Eric Markusen. “We are aware at some level that in a moment we and everyone and
everything we have ever touched or loved could be annihilated, and yet we go about
our ordinary routines as though no such threat exists.”
68
In his classic cry for peace,
Jonathan Schell described The Fate of the Earth as “poised on a hair trigger, waiting
IMPERIALISM, WAR, SOCIAL REVOLUTION
56
for the ‘button’ to be ‘pushed’ by some misguided or deranged human being or for
some faulty computer chip to send out the instruction to fire. That so much should
be balanced on so fine a point . . . is a fact against which belief rebels.”
69
Lifton and Markusen compared the mindset of Nazi leaders and technocrats with
those managing nuclear armories in the contemporary age. Both cultures reflected
deep, sometimes hysterical preoccupations with “national security,” which could be
employed to depict one’s own acts of aggression as pre-emptive. Both involved
professionals whose specialization and distancing from the actuality of destruction
helped them to inflict or prepare to inflict holocaust. A dry, euphemistic language
IMPERIALISM, WAR, SOCIAL REVOLUTION
57
Figure 2.3 Another iconic
image: the mushroom
cloud of an atomic bomb,
this one dropped by the
US on Nagasaki, Japan,
August 9, 1945.
Source: Imperial War
Museum.
rendered atrocity banal. Both mindsets accepted megadeath as necessary for purity
and cleansing:
With [nuclear] deterrence, there is the assumption that we must be prepared to kill
hundreds of millions of people in order to prevent large-scale killing, to cure the
world of genocide. With the Nazis, the assumption was that killing all Jews was a
way of curing not only the Aryan race but all humankind. Involvement in a
therapeutic mission helps block out feelings of the deaths one is or may be
inflicting.
70
Whatever the parallels, the immensity of modern nuclear weapons’ destructive power
was far beyond Hitler’s wildest fantasies. Scholars coined the term “omnicide” – total
killing – to describe the extinction that nuclear arms could impose: not only on
humans, but on the global ecosystem and all complex life forms, with the possible
exception of the hardy cockroach. Nuclearism is the one threat that can make past
and present genocides seem small.
Younger readers of this book may find these comments melodramatic. They will
lack direct memories of the “balance of terror” and the (il)logic of “mutually assured
destruction” that pervaded the Cold War. These spawned a degree of fear and mass
psychosis that marked for life many of those who lived under it, including myself.
Antinuclear sentiment sparked moves towards a prohibition regime (see Chapter 12),
built around arms control treaties between the superpowers and monitoring the
peaceful use of nuclear energy. This left the situation still extremely volatile, as popu-
lations across the Western world recognized in the 1980s: they staged the largest
protest demonstrations in postwar European and North American history.
Since that time, immediate tensions have subsided. Few today feel themselves
under the perpetual shadow of the mushroom cloud; but, arguably, this reflects
no diminution of the threat. Thousands of missiles remain in the armories of the
major nuclear powers – enough to destroy the world many times over. While several
nuclear or proto-nuclear powers have abandoned their programs (South Africa, Brazil,
Argentina), other states have recently joined the nuclear club, including India,
Pakistan, and probably North Korea. At least one “conflict dyad” seems capable of
sparking a nuclear holocaust on short notice: that of India and Pakistan. These
countries have fought four wars since 1947, and seemed poised for a fifth as recently
as 2001.
In another way, too, the nuclear threat has multiplied. The Soviet collapse left
thousands of missiles in varying states of decay, and often poorly guarded.
71
They
made attractive targets for mafiosi and impoverished military officers seeking the
ultimate black-market payoff. The client might be a rogue state or terrorist movement
that would have little compunction about using its prize against enemies or “infidels.”
The next chapter of the nuclear saga thus remains to be written. It is disturbingly
possible that it will be a genocidal, even omnicidal one.
IMPERIALISM, WAR, SOCIAL REVOLUTION
58
■
FURTHER STUDY
Omer Bartov, Hitler’s Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich.New York:
Oxford University Press, 1992. Brief, seminal study; see also Bartov’s The Eastern
Front, 1941–45.
Antony Beevor, Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege, 1942–1943. New York: Penguin, 1999.
Unforgettable depiction of the Battle of Stalingrad, a microcosm of the
Soviet–German war.
Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking. New York: Penguin, 1998. Account of Japan’s
genocidal massacres and mass rape in China in 1937–38.
John Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War. New York:
Pantheon, 1986. Analyzes the racism of both the US and Japanese war efforts,
and its transformation into peaceful cooperation after 1945.
Barbara Ehrenreich, Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War.New York:
Metropolitan Books, 1997. Fascinating interpretation of warfare as a vestige of
human beings’ prehistoric struggle against predators.
J. Glenn Gray, The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle. Omaha, NB: University of
Nebraska Press, 1998. Evocation of the soldier’s soul, first published in 1959.
Fred Halliday, Revolution and World Politics: The Rise and Fall of the Sixth Great
Power. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999. Global overview by a leading
scholar of revolutions.
Adam Jones, “A Bibliography of War,” http://adamjones.freeservers.com/
bibliography_of_war.html.
Eric J. Leed, No Man’s Land: Combat and Identity in World War I.NewYork:
Cambridge University Press, 1979. Perhaps the most enlightening depiction of
trench warfare in the First World War.
Robert Jay Lifton and Eric Markusen, The Genocidal Mentality: Nazi Holocaust and
Nuclear Threat. New York: Basic Books, 1990. Compares the mindset of Nazi
leaders and functionaries with that of their counterparts in the nuclear age.
Eric Markusen and David Kopf, The Holocaust and Strategic Bombing: Genocide
and Total War in the Twentieth Century. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995.
Excellent analysis of points of sociological and psychological cross-over.
Arno J. Mayer, The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Epic study of two epochal
revolutions.
Robert Melson, Revolution and Genocide: On the Origins of the Armenian Genocide
and the Holocaust. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Important
exploration of the interweaving of war, revolution, and genocide.
Jean-Paul Sartre and Arlette El Kaïm-Sartre, On Genocide. Boston, MA: Beacon
Press, 1968. Sartre’s controversial essay, set alongside evidence of US crimes in
Vietnam.
Jonathan Schell, The Fate of the Earth and the Abolition. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2000. Two key works on nuclearism, now in a combined
edition.
Martin Shaw, War and Genocide: Organized Killing in Modern Society. Cambridge:
Polity Press, 2003. The best introduction to the subject.
IMPERIALISM, WAR, SOCIAL REVOLUTION
59
Yukiko Tanaka, Hidden Horrors: Japanese War Crimes in World War II. Boulder, CO:
Westview Press, 1997. Examines biological experiments, sexual enslavement, and
atrocities against prisoners-of-war.
■
NOTES
1 Leonard Seabrooke, “Imperialism,” in Martin Griffiths, ed., Encyclopedia of International
Relations and Global Politics (London: Routledge, 2005), p. 398.
2 “Important Concepts in Global Studies,” http://www.ripon.edu/academics/global/
concepts.html.
3 A readable popular account is Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia’s
Founding (New York: Vintage, 1988).
4 Hence, I think, the recent destinies of Kuwait and East Timor.
5 The term was first deployed by leading Marxist theoreticians such as Lenin and
Gramsci. The most prominent treatment of the theme is that of Michael Hechter,
who built his analysis around the English conquest of the “Celtic Fringe” (Scotland,
Wales, and Ireland). See Hechter, Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British
National Development, 1536–1966 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press,
1975).
6 For an overview of the literature and law surrounding “famine crimes,” see David Marcus,
“Famine Crimes in International Law,” The American Journal of International Law,
97 (2003), pp. 245–81; and Rhoda E. Howard-Hassmann, “Genocide and State-induced
Famine: Global Ethics and Western Responsibility for Mass Atrocities in Africa,”
Perspectives on Global Development and Technology (forthcoming 2006).
7 On famine crimes in North Korea, see Jasper Becker, Rogue Regime: Kim Jong-Il and the
Looming Threat of North Korea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
8 Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (New York: Anchor, 1999), p. 168. Sen’s 1977
study of the 1943–45 famine in colonial Bengal, in which some three million Indians
died, prompted Henry Shue to coin his famous phrase, “the Holocaust of Neglect.” Sen,
“Starvation and Exchange Entitlements: A General Approach and Its Application to the
Great Bengal Famine,” Cambridge Journal of Economics, 1: 1 (1977), pp. 33–59; Shue,
Basic Rights: Subsistence, Affluence, and U.S. Foreign Policy (2nd edn) (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 207 (n. 17).
9 Stéphane Courtois et al., The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).
10 See Cecil Woodham-Smith, The Great Hunger: Ireland 1845–1849 (London: Hamish
Hamilton, 1962).
11 Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World
(London: Verso, 2001), pp. 158, 174.
12 Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts, pp. 15, 22, 37–38, 152, 287–88, 290. Eric Hobsbawm
has also pointed out that colonial policy during the Indian famines occurred against a
backdrop of Britain’s “virtual destruction . . . of what had been a flourishing domestic
and village industry which supplemented the rural incomes” across India, but which
competed with British products. This “deindustrialization made the peasant village itself
more dependent on the single, fluctuating fortune of the harvest,” and correspondingly
more vulnerable when famine struck. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848
(London: Abacus, 1994), p. 201.
13 Joseph Conrad, “Geography and Explorers,” in Conrad, Last Essays (London: J.M. Dent
& Sons, 1926), p. 25.
14 Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), p. 4.
15 Martin Ewans, European Atrocity, African Catastrophe: Leopold II, the Congo Free State and
its Aftermath (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2002), p. 3.
16 Quoted in Ewans, European Atrocity, African Catastrophe, pp. 112–13. Caryatids are
IMPERIALISM, WAR, SOCIAL REVOLUTION
60
(female) figures in the columns of Greek architecture, “used as pillar[s]” to support friezes
and other stonework (The Concise Oxford Dictionary).
17 Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost, p. 233.
18 Neal Ascherson, The King Incorporated: Leopold the Second and the Congo (London:
Granta, 1999), p. 251.
19 Ascherson, The King Incorporated, p. 9.
20 For more on the gendering of the catastrophe, see Adam Jones/Gendercide Watch, “Case
Study: Corvée (Forced) Labour,” http://www.gendercide.org/case_corvee.html.
21 Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost, p. 232. Nor were the Belgians the only imperial power
to inflict genocidal atrocities on Congo: according to Hochschild (p. 280), French rule
in “their” part of the Congo resulted in population losses also approaching 50 percent in
the most afflicted regions.
22 Ascherson, The King Incorporated, p. 9.
23 See also E.D. Morel’s influential contribution, Red Rubber: The Story of the Rubber Slave
Trade Which Flourished on the Congo for Twenty Years, 1890–1910 (Manchester: The
National Labour Press, 1920).
24 R.J. Rummel, Death by Government (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1997),
pp. 146, 151.
25 Rummel, Death by Government, p. 150.
26 For in-depth treatments of Japanese forced prostitution in the occupied territories, see
Yuki Tanaka, Japan’s Comfort Women: The Military and Involuntary Prostitution During
War and Occupation (London: Routledge, 2002); George L. Hicks, The Comfort Women:
Japan’s Brutal Regime of Enforced Prostitution in the Second World War (New York: W.W.
Norton, 1997).
27 Yukiko Tanaka, Hidden Horrors: Japanese War Crimes in World War II (Boulder, CO:
Westview Press, 1997), pp. 137–38. A good, brief introduction to Japanese crimes is
Laurence Rees, Horror in the East: Japan and the Atrocities of World War II (Cambridge,
MA: Da Capo Press, 2002).
28 See Sheldon H. Harris, Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare, 1932–45 and the
American Cover-Up (rev. edn) (London: Routledge, 2001).
29 S. Brian Willson, “Bob Kerrey’s Atrocity, the Crime of Vietnam and the Historic Pattern
of US Imperialism,” in Adam Jones, ed., Genocide, War Crimes and the West: History and
Complicity (London: Zed Books, 2004), pp. 167–69. The best single-volume history of
the French and US imperial interventions in Indochina is Marilyn B. Young, The
Vietnam Wars 1945–1990 (New York: HarperPerennial, 1991).
30 Arthur Jay Klinghoffer, “International Citizens’ Tribunals on Human Rights,” in Jones,
ed., Genocide, War Crimes and the West, p. 355.
31 Jean-Paul Sartre, “On Genocide,” in Jean-Paul Sartre and Arlette El Kaïm-Sartre, On
Genocide (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1968), p. 82.
32 “In the Vietnam War the use of bombing tactics and cruel weapons against the civilian
population appears to me to establish a prima facie case of genocide against the United
States.” Richard Falk, writing in 1968; quoted in Arthur Jay Klinghoffer and Judith
Klinghoffer, International Citizens’ Tribunals: Mobilizing Public Opinion to Advance
Human Rights (New York: Palgrave, 2002), p. 235 (n. 26).
33 Eric Margolis, War at the Top of the World: The Struggle for Afghanistan, Kashmir, and
Tibet (New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 18.
34 Sylvain Boulouque, “Communism in Afghanistan,” in Courtois et al., The Black Book of
Communism, p. 725.
35 Boulouque, “Communism in Afghanistan,” p. 717.
36 Helen Fein, “Discriminating Genocide from War Crimes: Vietnam and Afghanistan
Reexamined,” Denver Journal of International Law and Policy, 22: 1 (1993), p. 61.
37 See Caroline Elkins, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya
(New York: Henry Holt, 2005).
38 See “The Relationship Between Genocide and Total War,” ch. 4 in Eric Markusen and
David Kopf, The Holocaust and Strategic Bombing: Genocide and Total War in the
IMPERIALISM, WAR, SOCIAL REVOLUTION
61
Twentieth Century (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995), pp. 55–78. The Library of
Social Science website (http://home.earthlink.net/~libraryofsocialscience/) has a number
of Richard Koenigsberg’s stimulating articles on war and genocide, including “Dying for
One’s Country: The Logic of War and Genocide,” and “As the Soldier Dies, So Does the
Nation Come Alive: The Sacrificial Meaning of Warfare.”
39 Christopher J. Fettweis, “War as Catalyst: Moving World War II to the Center of
Holocaust Scholarship,” Journal of Genocide Research, 5: 2 (2003), p. 225.
40 “Genocide can be regarded as a particular form of modern warfare, and an extension of
the more common form of degenerate war,” which “involves the deliberate and systematic
extension of war against an organized armed enemy to war against a largely unarmed
civilian population....Therefore, the best way of making sense of genocide is to see it
as a distinctive form of war.” Martin Shaw, War and Genocide: Organized Killing in
Modern Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003), p. 5.
41 Fettweis, “War as Catalyst,” p. 228.
42 Barbara Ehrenreich, Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War (New York:
Metropolitan Books, 1997), pp. 180–81.
43 Alex Alvarez, Governments, Citizens, and Genocide: A Comparative and Interdisciplinary
Approach (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2001), p. 68. Ehrenreich notes
that “just as the elite style of warfare had called forth feudalism in settings as different as
medieval Europe and Japan, mass armies everywhere led to the bureaucratic state.”
Ehrenreich, Blood Rites, p. 183.
44 I am grateful to Benjamin Madley for this insight.
45 Norman M. Naimark, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-century Europe
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), p. 187.
46 George L. Mosse, quoted in Ehrenreich, Blood Rites, p. 183.
47 Alvarez, Governments, Citizens, and Genocide, p. 68.
48 Barash quoted in Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman, Denying History: Who Says the
Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It? (Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 2002), p. 93.
49 Ehrenreich, Blood Rites, p. 196.
50 Peter Uvin, Aiding Violence: The Development Enterprise in Rwanda (West Hartford,
CT: Kumarian Press, 1998).
51 All quotes from comments posted to “The Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler,” May 11, 2004,
http://www.nicedoggie.net/archives/004152.html.
52 The former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, Paul Craig Roberts, wrote in
November 2004: “Many Bush partisans send me e-mails fiercely advocating ‘virtuous
violence.’ They do not flinch at the use of nuclear weapons against Muslims who refuse
to do as we tell them....Many also express their conviction that all of Bush’s [domestic]
critics should be rounded up and sent to the Middle East in time for the first nuke.”
Roberts, “There Is No One Left to Stop Them,” AntiWar.com, http://www.antiwar.
com/roberts/?articleid=4007.
53 John Keegan, The First World War (New York: Vintage, 1998), p. 299.
54 In 1989, I walked the Somme battlefields; the experience is described, with accompanying
photos, in Adam Jones, “No Man’s Land,” The Gazette (Montreal), December 11, 1989
(available at http://adamjones.freeservers.com/nomans.htm).
55 Shaw, War and Genocide, p. 172. In a similar vein, Michael Burleigh writes that many
perpetrators of the Jewish Holocaust were, like Hitler, “war veterans who, having survived
the trenches, had few moral inhibitions about shooting millions into other trenches.
Hitler did not pluck his wish to use poison gas against Jews from nowhere.” Michael
Burleigh, Ethics and Extermination: Reflections on Nazi Genocide (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997), p. 223.
56 A good overview of the Soviet side of the German–Soviet conflict is Richard Overy,
Russia’s War (London: Penguin, 1997). See also Alan Clark, Barbarossa (New York:
Perennial, 1985); Antony Beevor, Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege, 1942–1943 (London:
Penguin, 1999); John Erickson’s two-volume study, The Road to Stalingrad and The
IMPERIALISM, WAR, SOCIAL REVOLUTION
62
Road to Berlin (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999); and British diplomat
Alexander Werth’s towering memoir, Russia at War, 1941–1945 (New York: Carroll &
Graf, 1999).
57 Omer Bartov, Germany’s War and the Holocaust: Disputed Histories (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 2003), p. 7.
58 Omer Bartov, Hitler’s Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 129.
59 Ehrenburg quoted in Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, A Terrible Revenge: The Ethnic Cleansing
of the East European Germans, 1944–1950 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), p. 34.
60 Stalin quoted in Milovan Djilas, Wartime (New York: Harvest, 1980), p. 435.
61 Norman M. Naimark, The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of
Occupation, 1945–1949 (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 1995), pp. 72, 133; see
also pp. 235–50 on the postwar uranium mining that killed thousands of German
workers.
62 Gary Paul Bass, Stay the Hand of Vengeance: The Politics of War Crimes Tribunals
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 198.
63 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (London: Penguin, various
editions).
64 Fascism “is closely associated with imperialism, militarism and nationalism. The logic of
belief in racial superiority leads to policies of conquest, domination and even elimination
of lesser races.” Graham Evans and Richard Newnham, The Penguin Dictionary of
International Relations (London: Penguin, 1999), p. 168.
65 Shaw, War and Genocide, p. 29.
66 Robert Melson, Revolution and Genocide: On the Origins of Armenian Genocide and the
Holocaust (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 18.
67 Eric Markusen and Matthias Bjørnlund, “Hiroshima: Culmination of Strategic
Bombing, Beginning of the Threat of Nuclear Omnicide,” paper prepared for the
symposium “Terror in the Sky: Indiscriminate Bombing from Hiroshima to Today,”
Hiroshima Peace Institute, August 2, 2003.
68 Robert Jay Lifton and Eric Markusen, The Genocidal Mentality: Nazi Holocaust and
Nuclear Threat (New York: Basic Books, 1990), p. 38.
69 Jonathan Schell, The Fate of the Earth and the Abolition (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2000), p. 182.
70 Lifton and Markusen, The Genocidal Mentality, p. 226.
71 See Terrence Henry, “Russia’s Loose Nukes,” The Atlantic Monthly, December 2004,
pp. 74–75.
IMPERIALISM, WAR, SOCIAL REVOLUTION
63
PART 2 CASES
■
Genocides of
Indigenous Peoples
■
INTRODUCTION
This chapter considers the impact of European invasion upon diverse indigenous
peoples, from the Americas to Africa and Australasia. Vast geographic, temporal, and
cultural differences exist among these cases, but there are also important common
features in the strategies and outcomes of genocide.
1
To grasp this phenomenon, we must first define “indigenous peoples.” The task
is not easy. Indeed, both in discourse and in international law, the challenge of defi-
nition remains a “complex [and] delicate” one, in Ronald Niezen’s recent appraisal.
2
Nevertheless, there are “some areas of general consensus among formal attempts at
definition,” well captured in a 1987 UN report by José Martínez Cobo:
Indigenous communities, peoples and nations are those which, having a historical
continuity with pre-invasion and pre-colonial societies that developed on their
territories, consider themselves distinct from other sectors of the society now
prevailing in those territories, or parts of them. They form at present nondominant
sectors of society and are determined to preserve, develop and transmit to future
generations their ancestral territories and their ethnic identity, as the basis of their
continued existence as peoples, in accordance with their own cultural patterns,
social institutions and legal systems.
3
By this definition, “indigenous” peoples are inseparable from processes of colonialism
and imperialism which, also crucially, consigned the previously dominant population
67
CHAPTER 3
of a colonized territory to a marginal status.
4
A nexus of indigenous identity and
structural subordination is generally held to persist today.
The political and activist components of the indigenist project are also clear
from Martínez Cobo’s definition. Indigenous peoples proclaim the validity and worth
of their cultures, languages, laws, religious beliefs, and political institutions; they
demand respect and political space. Increasingly, they have mobilized to denounce
the genocides visited upon them in the past and demand their rights in the present.
In large part thanks to the growth of international governmental and nongovern-
mental organizations, notably the United Nations system, these mobilizations of
indigenous peoples have assumed a global character. This is analyzed further in the
section on “Indigenous revival,” below.
■
COLONIALISM AND THE DISCOURSE OF EXTINCTION
The destiny of indigenous peoples in the Americas and worldwide cannot be under-
stood without reference to the linked institutions of imperialism and colonialism,
examined in detail in the previous chapter. In general, though not overlooking
the counterexample of African slavery, the destruction of indigenous peoples was
less catastrophic in instances of informal empire. Correspondingly, policies of
extermination and/or exploitation unto death were most pronounced in areas where
Europeans sought to conquer and settle indigenous territories. The focus here will
be on settler colonialism.
Three major ideological tenets stand out as justifying and facilitating the European
conquests. The first, most prominent in the British realm (especially the United
States, Canada, and Australasia), was a legal-utilitarian justification, according to
which native peoples had no right to territories they inhabited, owing to their “failure”
to exploit them adequately. This translated in Australasia to the fiction of terra nullius,
i.e., that the territories in question had no original inhabitants in a legal sense; and,
in America, to the similar concept of vacuum domicilium, “empty dwelling.”
5
The
second tenet, most prominent in Latin America, was a religious ideology that justi-
fied invasion and conquest as a means of saving native souls from the fires of hell.
The third, more diffuse, underpinning was a racial-eliminationist ideology. Under
the influence of the most modern scientific thinking of the age, world history was
viewed as revolving around the inevitable, sometimes lamentable supplanting of
primitive peoples by more advanced and “civilized” ones. This would be engineered
both by human hands, through military confrontations between indigenous peoples
and better-armed Europeans, and “naturally” through a gradual dying-off of the
native populations. “Genocide began to be regarded as the inevitable byproduct of
progress.”
6
A sophisticated study of this ideology of inevitable extinction is Patrick
Brantlinger’s Dark Vanishings. Brantlinger points to the remarkable “uniformity...
of extinction discourse,” which pervaded the speech and writings of “humanitarians,
missionaries, scientists, government officials, explorers, colonists, soldiers, journalists,
novelists, and poets.” Extinction discourse often celebrated the destruction of native
peoples, as when the otherwise humane Mark Twain, author of Huckleberry Finn,
GENOCIDES OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLES
68
wrote that the North American Indian was “nothing but a poor, filthy, naked scurvy
vagabond, whom to exterminate were a charity to the Creator’s worthier insects and
reptiles.”
7
Often, though, the discourse was more complex and ambivalent, including
elements of nostalgia and lament for the vanishing races. Take this passage by the
English naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, who shares credit with Charles Darwin for
the theory of natural selection:
The red Indian in North America and in Brazil; the Tasmanian, Australian, and
New Zealander in the southern hemisphere, die out, not from any one special
cause, but from the inevitable effects of an unequal mental and physical struggle.
The intellectual and moral, as well as the physical qualities of the European are
superior; the same powers and capacities which have made him rise in a few
centuries from the condition of the wandering savage . . . to his present state of
culture and advancement . . . enable him when in contact with the savage man,
to conquer in the struggle for existence, and to increase at the expense of the less
adapted varieties in the animal and vegetable kingdoms, – just as the weeds of
Europe overrun North America and Australia, extinguishing native productions
by the inherent vigor of their organization, and by their greater capacity for
existence and multiplication.
8
Several of the signal features of extinction discourse are apparent here, including
the parallels drawn with natural processes of biological selection, and the claims of
racial superiority imputed to northern peoples. But it is interesting that Wallace
depicts the European conquerors as analogous to “weeds...overrun[ning] North
America and Australia,” rather than as a noble master race. Wallace was in fact an
“anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist,”
9
hence the critical edge to his commentary.
But like some contemporary observers (a couple of whom are cited in the section
on “Celebrating genocide, denying genocide,” below), Wallace found little difficulty
in reconciling the extermination of native peoples with his progressive political
views.
There is a close link between extinction discourse and the more virulent and
systematically hateful ideologies that fueled the Nazi holocaust in Europe (Box 6a).
The Nazis, writes Sven Lindqvist provocatively, “have been made sole scapegoats
for ideas of extermination that are actually a common European heritage.”
10
We
should also note the interaction of extinction discourse with ideologies of modern-
ization and capitalist development, which created masses of “surplus or redundant
population[s],” in Richard Rubinstein’s phrase. As Rubinstein explores in his Age of
Triage, these ideologies produced destructive or genocidal outcomes in European
societies as well, as with the Irish famine of 1846 to 1848 and the Jewish Holocaust
of 1941–45.
11
Ironically, this modernizing ideology also resulted in the transport –
as convicts or refugees from want and famine – of millions of “surplus” European
peoples to the New World. Especially in Australia, these settlers became key instru-
ments of genocide against the indigenous inhabitants of the territories to which they
were consigned.
GENOCIDES OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLES
69
■
THE CONQUEST OF THE AMERICAS
The reader may ask himself if this is not cruelty and injustice of a kind so terrible that
it beggars the imagination, and whether these poor people would not fare far better if
they were entrusted to the devils in Hell than they do at the hands of the devils of the
New World who masquerade as Christians.
Bartolomé de las Casas, Spanish friar, 1542
I have been looking far,
Sending my spirit north, south, east and west.
Trying to escape death,
But could find nothing,
No way of escape.
Song of the Luiseno Indians of California
The European holocaust against indigenous peoples in the Americas was arguably
the most extensive and destructive genocide of all time. Ward Churchill calls it
“unparalleled in human history, both in terms of its sheer magnitude and its
duration.”
12
Over nearly five centuries, and perhaps continuing to the present, an
impressively wide range of genocidal measures has been imposed upon the aboriginal
population of the hemisphere.
13
These include:
• genocidal massacres;
• biological warfare, using pathogens (especially smallpox and plague) to which
the indigenous peoples had no resistance;
14
• spreading of disease via the “reduction” of Indians to densely crowded and
unhygienic settlements;
• slavery and forced/indentured labor, especially though not exclusively in Latin
America,
15
in conditions often rivaling those of Nazi concentration camps;
• mass population removals to barren “reservations,” sometimes involving death
marches en route, and generally leading to widespread mortality and population
collapse upon arrival;
• deliberate starvation and famine, exacerbated by destruction and occupation of
the native land base and food resources;
• forced education of indigenous children in white-run schools, where mortality
rates could reach genocidal levels.
Spanish America
The Spanish invasion, occupation, and exploitation of most of “Latin” America
began in the late fifteenth century, and resulted, according to David Stannard, in
“the worst series of human disease disasters, combined with the most extensive and
most violent program of human eradication, that this world has ever seen.”
16
The tone
was set with the very first territory conquered, the densely populated Caribbean island
of Hispaniola (today the Dominican Republic and Haiti). Tens of thousands of
GENOCIDES OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLES
70
hapless Indians were exterminated outright: the Spanish “forced their way into native
settlements,” wrote the eyewitness Bartolomé de las Casas, “slaughtering everyone
they found there, including small children, old men, [and] pregnant women.”
17
Those men not killed at the outset were worked to death in gold-mines; women
survivors were consigned to harsh agricultural labor and sexual servitude. Massacred,
sickened, and enslaved, Hispaniola’s native population collapsed, “as would any
nation subjected to such appalling treatment”
18
– declining from as many as eight
million people at the time of the invasion to a scant 20,000 less than three decades
later.
19
African slaves were then introduced to replace the native workforce, and toiled
under similarly genocidal conditions.
Rumors of great civilizations, limitless wealth, and populations to convert to
Christianity in the Aztec and Inca empires lured the Spanish on to Mexico and
Central America. Soon thereafter, assaults were launched against the Inca empire in
present-day Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador. At the time, the Incas constituted the largest
empire anywhere in the world, but with their leader Atahuallpa captured and killed,
the empire was decapitated, and quickly fell. “It is extremely difficult now to grasp
the beliefs and motives of the Conquistadores [conquerors] as they cheated, tortured,
burnt, maimed, murdered and massacred their way through South and Meso-
America, causing such ferocious destruction that their compatriot Pedro de Ciéza de
Léon complained that ‘wherever Christians have passed, conquering and discovering,
it seems as though a fire has gone, consuming.’”
20
A holocaust it indeed proved for
the Indians enslaved on the plantations and in the silver-mines of the former Inca
empire, where the Spanish instituted another genocidal regime of forced labor.
Conditions in the mines – notably those in Mexico and at Potosí and Huancavelica
in Upper Peru (Bolivia) – resulted in death rates matching or exceeding those of
Hispaniola. According to David Stannard, Indians in the Bolivian mines had a life
expectancy of three to four months, “about the same as that of someone working at
slave labor in the synthetic rubber manufacturing plant at Auschwitz in the 1940s”
21
(see figure 3.1).
Only in the mid-sixteenth century did the exterminatory impact of Spanish
rule begin to wane, and Indian populations to stage something of a demographic
recovery. A modus vivendi was established between colonizers and colonized, featuring
continued heavy exploitation of remaining Indian populations, but also a degree of
practical autonomy for native peoples. It survived until the mid-nineteenth century,
when the now-independent governments of Spanish America sought to implement
the liberal economic prescriptions that were popular in Europe. This resulted in
another massive assault on “uneconomic” Indian landholdings, the further erosion
of the Indian land base and impoverishment of its population, and the “opening up”
of both land and labor resources to capitalist transformation. Meanwhile, in South
America as in North America, expansionist governments launched “Indian wars”
against native nations that were seen as impediments to economic development and
national progress. The extermination campaigns against Araucana Indians in Chile
and the Querandí in Argentina form part of national lore in these countries; only very
recently have South American scholars and others begun to examine them under the
rubric of genocide.
GENOCIDES OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLES
71
The United States and Canada
The first sustained contact between Europeans and the indigenous peoples of
North America developed around the whaling industry that, in the sixteenth century,
began to cross the Atlantic in search of new bounty. Whaling crews put ashore to
process the catch, and were generally welcomed by the coastal peoples. Similarly,
when the Pilgrims – religious refugees from England – arrived at Plymouth Rock,
Massachusetts, in 1608, their survival through the first harsh winters was due solely
to the generosity of Indians who opened their stores to them, and trained them in
the ways of the region’s agriculture. The settlers, though, responded to this amity with
contempt for the “heathen” Indians. In addition, as more of them flooded into the
northeastern seaboard of the future United States, they brought with them diseases
GENOCIDES OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLES
72
Figure 3.1 The Cerro Rico overlooking the city of Potosí, Bolivia. Following the discovery of silver in the mid-sixteenth century,
this lone mountain largely paid for the profligacy and foreign wars of the Spanish Crown for some two hundred years. Millions
of native Indians and some African slaves were forced to work in horrific conditions, making the Cerro possibly the world’s
single biggest graveyard: anywhere from one million to eight million forced laborers perished in the mines, or from silicosis
and other diseases soon after. By some estimates, the mines killed seven out of every ten people who worked there. Time for
a Potosí holocaust museum, perhaps?
Source: Author’s photo, 2005.
that wreaked havoc on Indian communities, leading to catastrophic depopulation
that paved the way for settler expansion into the devastated Indian heartlands.
Disease was “without doubt...the single most important factor in American
Indian population decline,”
22
which in five centuries reduced the Indian population
of present-day Canada and the United States from seven to ten million (though
estimates range as high as eighteen million) to 237,000 by the 1890s.
23
Smallpox
was the biggest killer: uncounted numbers of Indians died as did O-wapa-shaw,
“the greatest man of the Sioux, with half his band . . . their bodies swollen, and
covered with pustules, their eyes blinded, hideously howling their death song in utter
despair.”
24
Cholera, measles, plague, typhoid, and alcoholism also took an enormous
toll. Other factors included “the often deliberate destructions of flora and fauna
that American Indians used for food and other purposes,”
25
whether as a strategy
of warfare or simply as part of the rape of the continent’s resources. An example of
the latter was the extermination of the great herds of bison, which were hunted into
near extinction by the settlers. Perhaps sixty million of them roamed the Great Plains
when Europeans arrived on the continent; “by 1895 there were fewer than 1,000
animals left,” and this “had not only driven [the Indians] to starvation and defeat
but had destroyed the core of their spiritual and ceremonial world.”
26
A dimension of genocidal massacre was also prominent throughout. According
to Russell Thornton, though direct slaughter was a subsidiary cause of Native
American demographic collapse, it was decisive in the trajectories of some Indian
nations “brought to extinction or the brink of extinction by...genocide in the name
of war.”
27
Perhaps the first such instance in North America was the Pequot War
(1636–37) in present-day Connecticut, when Puritan settlers reacted to an Indian
raid by launching a campaign to exterminate hundreds of defenseless natives.
28
This
“created a precedent for later genocidal wars,”
29
including another notorious mass
killing more than two centuries later. In November 1864, at Sand Creek, Colorado,
Colonel John Chivington commanded his state militiamen to “kill and scalp all,
little and big” – including the youngest children, because “Nits make lice.”
30
The
ensuing massacre was so macabre that it prompted a government inquiry, at which
Lieutenant James Connor testified:
I did not see a body of man, woman or child but was scalped, and in many
instances their bodies were mutilated in the most horrible manner – men, women
and children’s privates cut out, &c; I heard one man say that he cut out a woman’s
private parts and had them for exhibition on a stock...I also heard of numerous
instances in which men had cut out the private parts of females and stretched them
over their saddle-bows and wore them over their hats while riding in the ranks.
31
Recalling this rampage decades later, US President Theodore Roosevelt would call
it “as righteous and beneficial a deed as ever took place on the frontier.”
32
As noted above, killing was just one of a complex of genocidal strategies that were
intended to result in the elimination of Indian peoples from the face of the Earth.
The Yuki Indians, for example, were subjected to one of the clearest and fastest
genocides of a native nation on US territory. The Yuki, numbering perhaps 20,000,
inhabited territory in northern California. With the seizure of California and other
GENOCIDES OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLES
73
Figure 3.2 US soldiers load the corpses of Indian victims of the Wounded Knee massacre for burial in mass graves, December 1890.
Source: Smithsonian Institution National Archives.
Mexican territories in 1847, the Yuki fell under US control. The following year there
began the California Gold Rush, “probably the single most destructive episode in
the whole history of Native/Euro-American relations.”
33
Ranchers and farmers flowed
in and, among many other atrocities, murdered Yuki men and stripped the com-
munities of children and women, taking the former for indentured servants and the
latter for “wives” and concubines. The Yuki land base was expropriated and the
“natives’ food supply...severely depleted.” Settler depredations received state sanc-
tion in 1859, when California governor John B. Weller “granted state commissions
to companies of volunteers that excelled in the killing of Indians.” The volunteers
were dispatched to “Indian country,” despite warnings from Army officers that they
would “hunt the Indians to extermination.” They proceeded to slaughter “all the
Indians they encountered regardless of age or sex.” The combination of “kidnapping,
epidemics, starvation, vigilante justice, and state-sanctioned mass killing” virtually
annihilated the Yuki, reducing their numbers from the original 20,000 to about 3,500
in 1854, and 168 by 1880.
34
An aghast eyewitness, Special Treasury Agent J. Ross
Browne, subsequently wrote:
In the history of the Indian race, I have seen nothing so cruel or relentless as the
treatment of those unhappy people by the authority constituted by law for their
protection. Instead of receiving aid and succor they have been starved and driven
away from the Reservations and then followed into the remote hiding places where
they have sought to die in peace, cruelly slaughtered until that [sic] a few are left
and that few without hope.
35
James Wilson likewise calls this “a sustained campaign of genocide” and argues that
“more Indians probably died as a result of deliberate, cold-blooded genocide in
California than anywhere else in North America.”
36
Other genocidal strategies
Forced relocations of Indian populations often took the form of genocidal death
marches, most infamously the “Trails of Tears” of the Cherokee and Navajo nations,
37
which killed between 20 and 40 percent of the targeted populations en route. The
barren “tribal reservations” to which survivors were consigned exacted their own
grievous toll through malnutrition and disease.
Then there were the so-called “residential schools,” in which generations of
Indian children were incarcerated after being removed from their homes and families.
The schools operated until very recent times; the last one in the United States was
not closed until 1972. In a searing account of the residential-school experience, titled
“Genocide by Any Other Name,” Ward Churchill describes the program as
the linchpin of assimilationist aspirations...in which it was ideally intended
that every single aboriginal child would be removed from his or her home, family,
community, and culture at the earliest possible age and held for years in state-
sponsored “educational” facilities, systematically deculturated, and simultaneously
GENOCIDES OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLES
75
indoctrinated to see her/his own heritage – and him/herself as well – in terms
deemed appropriate by a society that despised both to the point of seeking as a
matter of policy their utter eradication.
38
As Churchill points out, the injunction in the UN Genocide Convention against
“forcibly transferring children of the [targeted] group to another group” would
be enough to qualify this policy as genocidal – and in Australia, where a similar
policy was implemented, an investigative commission indeed found that it met the
Convention definition of genocide. However, there was much that was genocidal
in the operation of the North American residential schools apart from the “forcible
transfer” of the captive native children. Crucially, “mortality rates in the schools
were appalling from the outset,” resulting in death rates – from starvation, disease,
systematic torture, sexual predation,
39
and shattering psychological dislocation – that
matched or exceeded the death rates in Nazi concentration camps during the Second World
War. In Canada, for example, a study carried out in 1907, the so-called “Bryce
Report” named after the Indian Department’s chief medical officer,
revealed that of the 1,537 children who had attended the sample group of facilities
since they’d opened – a period of ten years, on average – 42 per cent had died of
“consumption or tuberculosis,” either at the schools or shortly after being
discharged. Extrapolating, Bryce’s data indicated that of the 3,755 native children
then under the “care” of Canada’s residential schools, 1,614 could be expected to
have died a miserable death by the end of 1910. In a follow-up survey conducted
in 1909, Bryce collected additional information, all of it corroborating his initial
report. At the Qu’Appelle School, the principal, a Father Hugonard, informed
Bryce that his facility’s record was “something to be proud of ” since “only” 153
of the 795 youngsters who’d attended it between 1884 and 1905 had died in school
or within two years of leaving it.
40
The experience of the residential schools reverberated through generations of native
life in Canada and the US. For example, the extraordinarily high level of alcoholism
among native peoples in North America was often explained in terms of an assumed
genetic disposition or debility. Now, it is increasingly understood to reflect the “worlds
of pain” inflicted by residential schooling, and the traumas inflicted in turn by
traumatized Indians upon their own children. Churchill talks of a “Residential School
Syndrome” (RSS) studied in Canada, which
includes acutely conflicted self-concept and lowered self-esteem, emotional
numbing (often described as “inability to trust or form lasting bonds”), somatic
disorder, chronic depression and anxiety (often phobic), insomnia and nightmares,
dislocation, paranoia, sexual dysfunction, heightened irritability and tendency to
fly into rages, strong tendencies towards alcoholism and drug addiction, and
suicidal behavior.
41
GENOCIDES OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLES
76
A contemporary case: The Maya of Guatemala
Modern Guatemala is riven by some of the greatest economic disparities in the
world, with the Mayan highlands exposed to severe exploitation and abuse on the
coffee and sugar plantations of the mountains and coastal plains. In 1944, what is
still known as the “Ten Years’ Spring” began under two reformist presidents, Juan
José Arévalo and Jacobo Arbenz. Arbenz, in particular, introduced significant labor
and land reforms. These were aimed at promoting successful capitalist moderniza-
tion in Guatemala, not socialist revolution. But a communist aim was imputed to
the reformers by key players in the United States – particularly the owners and
shareholders of the United Fruit Company, furious at the expropriation of unused
lands with compensation offered on the basis of the land’s declared tax value, which
was predictably low. With intimate access to the Eisenhower administration, and
exploiting the atmosphere of anti-communism that pervaded the US in the 1950s,
United Fruit and other opponents of Arbenz depicted him as a Soviet stooge. The
result was a CIA-sponsored military coup in 1954 that overthrew Arbenz and
installed a series of brutal military rulers.
42
Popular mobilizations against military rule, and in defense of native rights,
mounted in the 1970s, and also spawned a rebel movement headed by the Guerrilla
Army of the Poor (EGP). The Guatemalan regime’s response to the guerrilla threat
was massive and annihilatory. A holocaust descended upon the Mayan highlands. In
just six years, some 440 Indian villages were obliterated and some 200,000 Indians
massacred, often after torture, in scenes fully comparable to the early phase of Spanish
colonization half a millennium earlier. The genocide proceeded with the enthusiastic
support of the Reagan administration in the US, which reinstated aid to the
Guatemalan military and security forces when it took power in 1981.
43
In 1992, the quincentenary of Columbus’ invasion of Hispaniola, Rigoberta
Menchú, a Guatemalan Mayan, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Menchú lost
most of her immediate family in the genocide, and subsequently became a symbol
and spokesperson for indigenous peoples worldwide.
44
In 1996, the war was brought
formally to an end by a UN-mediated peace accord, and a “Historical Clarification
Commission” was established to investigate the atrocities of the 1970s and 1980s. The
Commission’s final report, released in February 1999, pointed to acts of “extreme
cruelty...such as the killing of defenseless children, often by beating them against
walls or throwing them alive into pits where the corpses of adults were later thrown;
the amputation of limbs; the impaling of victims; the killings of persons by covering
them in petrol and burning them alive,” all part of “military operations directed
towards the physical annihilation” of opposition forces. It ascribed to the government
and its paramilitary allies responsibility for 93 percent of the human rights violations
it investigated and reported; most of these “occurred with the knowledge or by the
order of the highest authorities of the State.”
45
Finally, the Commission’s report took
the important step of labeling the Guatemalan government’s campaign as genocidal.
All Maya had been designated as supporters of communism and terrorism, the report
noted, leading to “aggressive, racist and extremely cruel . . . violations that resulted in
the massive extermination of defenseless Mayan communities.”
46
GENOCIDES OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLES
77
■
AUSTRALIA’S ABORIGINES AND THE NAMIBIAN HERERO
The cases of the aboriginal populations of British-colonized Australia and German-
colonized Namibia further illuminate the fate of indigenous peoples worldwide. In
both instances, decades of denial gave way, at the twentieth century’s close, to a greater
readiness to acknowledge the genocidal character of colonial actions.
Genocide in Australia
In 1788, the “First Fleet” of British convicts was dumped on Australian soil. Over
the ensuing century-and-a-half, the aboriginal population of the island continent –
estimated at about 750,000 when the colonists arrived – was reduced to just 31,000
in 1911. The destruction was so immense that it was often claimed that one aboriginal
population, that of the island of Tasmania off Australia’s southern coast, had been
exterminated down to the very last person. This claim has now been decisively
challenged, as we will review shortly.
As in North America, the colonists did not arrive in Australia with the explicit
intention of exterminating the Aborigines. The massive destruction inflicted on
Australian Aborigines instead reflected a concatenation of ideologies, pressures, and
circumstances. Arriving whites were aghast at the primitive state of the Aborigines,
and quickly determined that they were (1) barely, if at all, human
47
and (2) utterly
useless to the colonial enterprise. Aboriginal lands, however, were coveted, particularly
as convicts began to be freed (but not allowed to return to England) and as new waves
of free settlers arrived during the nineteenth century. As the Australian colonial
economy came to center on vast landholdings for sheep-raising and cattle-grazing,
the standard trend of expansion into the interior brought colonists into ever-wider
and more conflictive contact with the Aborigines. Through the expedient of direct
massacre – “at least 20,000 aborigines, perhaps many more, were killed by the settlers
in sporadic frontier skirmishes throughout the nineteenth century and lasting into
the late 1920s”
48
– Aborigines were driven away from areas of white settlement and
from their own sources of sustenance. When they responded with desperate raids
on the settlers’ cattle stocks, settlers “retaliated” by “surround[ing] an aborigine
camp at night, attack[ing] at dawn, and massacr[ing] men, women, and children
alike.”
49
Formal colonial policy did not generally favor genocidal measures. Indeed, the
original instructions to colonial Governor Arthur Phillip were that he “endeavour
by every means in his power to open an intercourse with the natives and to conciliate
their goodwill, requiring all persons under his Government to live in amity and
kindness with them.” But these “benign utterances of far-away governments”
contrasted markedly with “the hard clashes of interest on the spot.”
50
Colonial officials
often turned a blind eye to atrocities against the Aborigines, and failed to intervene
effectively to suppress them. It is important to note as well that until the late
nineteenth century, no Aborigine was allowed to give testimony in a white man’s
court, rendering effective legal redress for dispossession and atrocity a practical
GENOCIDES OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLES
78
impossibility. Moreover, extinction discourse took full flight, with the British novelist
Anthony Trollope, for example, writing in the 1870s that the Aborigines’ “doom is
to be exterminated; and the sooner that their doom is accomplished, – so that there
can be no cruelty [!], – the better will it be for civilization.”
51
The combination of clashes between frontier settlers and natives, epidemic disease,
and extermination campaigns was strikingly similar to the North American experi-
ence. The destruction of the aboriginal population of Tasmania, an island off
Australia’s southern coast, is often cited as a paradigmatic case of colonial genocide.
The 3–4,000 native inhabitants were broken down by the usual traumas of contact,
and the handful of survivors of massacre and disease were dispatched (in a supposedly
noble gesture) to barren Flinders Island. There, they were prey to further bouts of
disease and chronic malnutrition, to which the Europeans and their leaders responded
with indifference.
52
The destruction was so extensive that, as noted, many observers contended that
the island’s aboriginals had been completely annihilated by the end of the nineteenth
century. This appears to have been true for full-blooded aboriginals, the last of whom,
a woman named Truganini, died in 1876. It ignored, however, aboriginals of mixed
blood – perhaps numbering in the thousands – whose descendants live on today.
Brantlinger argues that this was convenient for the colonizers, since “it meant that the
government could ignore the claims to recognition, land rights, schools, and so forth,
of the mixed-race Tasmanians – officially they did not exist as a separate or unique
population and culture.”
53
As was true for indigenous peoples elsewhere, the twentieth century witnessed
not only a demographic revival of the Australian Aborigines but – in the latter half
of the century – the emergence of a powerful movement for land rights and
restitution. Subsequently, this movement’s members worked to publicize the trauma
caused by the kidnapping of aboriginal children and their placement in white-run
institutional “homes.” These were strikingly similar, in their underlying (assimila-
tionist) ideology, rampant brutality, and sexual predation, to the “residential schools”
imposed upon North American Indians during the same period. In response to
growing protest about these “stolen generations” of aboriginal children (the title of
a landmark 1982 book by Peter Read),
54
a national commission of inquiry was struck
in 1995. Two years later it issued its report, Bringing Them Home, which stated that
Australia’s policy of transferring aboriginal children constituted genocide by the
UN Convention definition. This claim provoked immense and still-unresolved
controversy. The Australian Prime Minister at the time (and still), John Howard,
denounced the “black armband” view of his country’s history (that is, an “excessive”
emphasis on negative elements of the Australian and aboriginal experience). However,
although many voices were raised in public fora and the mass media supporting
Howard’s rejectionist stance, there was also widespread public sympathy for
Aborigines, as Colin Tatz points out:
The Australian public has responded to this National Inquiry in a quite
unprecedented way: hundreds of thousands sign “sorry books,” thousands stand
in queues to listen to removed [aboriginal] people telling their stories, many more
thousands plant small wooden hands, signifying their hands up to guilt or sorrow,
GENOCIDES OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLES
79
on lawns and beaches across the country. The Australian Labor Party has pledged
apology on return to office. State governments, churches, mission societies, city
and shire councils proclaim both sorrow and apology.
55
Moreover, Tatz reports, “the dreaded ‘g’ word is firmly with us....Genocide is now
in the vocabulary of Australian politics, albeit grudgingly, or even hostilely.”
56
The Herero genocide
For many years, the Ottoman campaign against the Armenians (Chapter 4)
was considered the first genocide of the twentieth century. Now, it is acknowledged
that the designation is more accurately applied to German colonial forces’ near-
extermination of the Herero nation in present-day Namibia, which took place in the
century’s first decade.
57
Although the Germans were late arrivals on the colonial scene, the pattern of
colonial invasion and occupation that provoked the Herero uprising was a familiar
one. Drawn by the opportunities for cattle ranching, some 5,000 Germans had
flooded into the territory by 1903. Colonists’ deception, suasion, and violent coercion
pushed the native population into an ever-narrower portion of its traditional land-
holdings. In 1904, the Hereros rose up against the Germans. Herero chief Samuel
Maherero led his fighters against military outposts, killing about 120 Germans. This
resistance to colonial domination infuriated the German leader Kaiser Wilhelm II,
who responded by dispatching a hardliner, Lt.-Gen. Lothar von Trotha, to “German
South-West Africa.” Von Trotha was firmly convinced that Africans “are all alike.
They only respond to force. It was and is my policy to use force with terrorism and
even brutality. I shall annihilate the revolting tribes with rivers of blood and rivers
of gold. Only after a complete uprooting will something emerge.”
58
After defeating the Hereros at the Battle of Hamakari in August 1904, the German
Army chased survivors into the bone-dry wastes of the Kalahari desert. Von Trotha
then issued his notorious “annihilation order” (Vernichtungsbefehl ). In it, he pledged
that “within the German borders every Herero, with or without a gun, with or with-
out cattle, will be shot. I will no longer accept women and children [as prisoners],
I will drive them back to their people or I will let them be shot at.”
59
The order
remained in place for several months, until a domestic outcry led the German
Chancellor to rescind it. A contemporary account describes Hereros emerging from
the Kalahari “starved to skeletons with hollow eyes, powerless and hopeless.”
60
They
were then allowed to move from the frying-pan to the fire: concentration camps.
“A continuing desire to destroy the Hereros played a part in the German mainte-
nance of such lethal camp conditions,” writes Benjamin Madley; he notes elsewhere
that “according to official German figures, of 15,000 Hereros and 2,200 Namas
incarcerated in camps, some 7,700 or 45 percent perished.”
61
(Following the cessation
of the Herero war, another tribal nation, the Nama, also rose up in revolt against
German rule and was similarly crushed, with approximately half the population
killed. Many scholars accordingly refer to the Namibian events as the genocide of
the Hereros and Namas.)
GENOCIDES OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLES
80
An advantage of a comparative and global-historical approach to genocide is
that it allows us to perceive important connections between campaigns of mass killing
and group destruction that are widely separated in time and space. Scholarship on
the genocide against the Hereros provides an excellent example. It is increasingly
acknowledged not only that this was the first genocide of the twentieth century, but
that it paved the way, in important respects, for the prototypical mass slaughter of
that century – the Jewish Holocaust (Chapter 6). As summarized by Madley:
The Herero genocide was a crucial antecedent to Nazi mass murder. It created
the German word Konzentrationslager [concentration camp] and the twentieth
century’s first death camp. Like Nazi mass murder, the Namibian genocides were
premised upon ideas like Lebensraum [living space], annihilation war [Vernich-
tungskrieg], and German racial supremacy. Individual Nazis were also linked to
colonial Namibia. Hermann Goering, who built the first Nazi concentration
camps, was the son of the first governor of colonial Namibia. Eugen Fischer, who
influenced Hitler and ran the institute that supported Joseph Mengele’s medical
“research” at Auschwitz, conducted racial studies in the colony. And Ritter von
Epp, godfather of the Nazi party and Nazi governor of Bavaria from 1933–1945,
led German troops against the Herero during the genocide.
62
Following the independence of Namibia in 1990 (from South Africa, which had
conquered the territory during the First World War), survivors’ descendants called
on Germany to apologize for the Herero genocide, and provide reparations. Why,
asked Herero leaders, was Germany willing to pay tens of billions of dollars to Jewish
survivors of Nazi genocide, but not even to acknowledge crimes against the Hereros?
Following strategies developed by Jewish advocates, the Hereros filed suit in the
United States for US$4 billion in compensation – half from the German government,
half from German companies that were alleged to have profited from the occupation
of Herero lands. In August 2004 – the centenary of the Herero uprising – the German
development-aid minister, Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul, attended a ceremony at
Okakarara in the region of Otjozondjupa, where the conflict had formally ended
back in 1906. The minister issued a formal apology that included the “G-word”:
“We Germans accept our historic and moral responsibility and the guilt incurred by
Germans at that time. . . . The atrocities committed at that time would have been
termed genocide.”
63
She also promised German development aid as an oblique form
of recompense.
■
DENYING GENOCIDE, CELEBRATING GENOCIDE
Denial is regularly condemned as the final stage of genocide (see Chapter 14). How,
then, are we to class the mocking or even celebrating of genocide? These are sadly not
uncommon responses, and they are nowhere more prominent than with regard to
genocides of indigenous peoples.
Among most sectors of informed opinion in the Americas – from Alaska to Tierra
del Fuego – the notion that indigenous peoples experienced a “genocide” at the hands
GENOCIDES OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLES
81
of their white conquerors is not only dismissed, but openly derided.
64
In a September
2001 post to the H-Genocide academic mailing list, Professor Alexander Bielakowski
of the University of Findlay engaged in what seemed outright genocidal denial,
writing that “if [it] was the plan” to “wipe out the American Indians...the US did
a damn poor job following through with it.”
65
This is a curious way to describe the
annihilation of up to 98 percent of the indigenous population of the United States
over three centuries. The fine British historian Michael Burleigh takes a similarly
flippant jab in his book Ethics and Extermination, scoffing at notions of “the ‘dis-
appearance’ of the [Australian] Aboriginals or Native Americans, some of whose
descendants mysteriously seem to be running multi-million dollar casinos.”
66
How
can a tiny Indian elite be considered representative of the poorest, shortest-lived
ethnic minority in the US and Canada?
Celebrations of indigenous genocide also have no clear parallel in mainstream
discourse. Thus one finds prominent essayist Christopher Hitchens describing
protests over the Columbus quincentenary as “an ignorant celebration of stasis and
backwardness, with an unpleasant tinge of self-hatred.” For Hitchens, the destruction
of Native American civilization was simply “the way that history is made, and to
complain about it is as empty as complaint about climatic, geological or tectonic
shift.” He justified the conquest on classic utilitarian grounds:
It is sometimes unambiguously the case that a certain coincidence of ideas,
technologies, population movements and politico-military victories leaves
humanity on a slightly higher plane than it knew before. The transformation of
part of the northern part of this continent into “America” inaugurated a nearly
boundless epoch of opportunity and innovation, and thus deserves to be celebrated
with great vim and gusto, with or without the participation of those who wish they
had never been born.
67
The arrogance and contempt on display in these comments is echoed in the pervasive
appropriation of Indian culture and nomenclature by North American white culture.
Note, for example, the practice of adopting ersatz Indian names and motifs for
professional sports teams. James Wilson argues that calling a Washington, DC foot-
ball franchise the “Redskins” is “roughly the equivalent of calling a team ‘the Buck
Niggers’ or ‘the Jewboys.’”
68
Other acts of appropriation include naming gas-guzzling
vehicles (the Winnebago, the Jeep Cherokee) after Indian nations, so that peoples
famous for their respectful custodianship of the environment are instead associated
with technologies that damage it. This is carried to sinister extremes with the grafting
of Indian names onto US military weaponry, as with the Apache attack helicopter and
the Tomahawk cruise missile. In Madley’s opinion, such nomenclature “casts Indians
as threatening and dangerous,” subtly providing “a post-facto justification for the
violence committed against them.”
69
GENOCIDES OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLES
82
■
COMPLEXITIES AND CAVEATS
Several of the complicating factors in evaluating the genocide of indigenous peoples
have been noted. Prime among them is the question of intent. (Before proceeding,
recall that some genocide scholars reject the Genocide Convention’s emphasis on
intentionality, and argue that the emphasis should be on outcomes. If this standard
is adopted, there is nothing in recorded human experience to set alongside the
genocide of the indigenous peoples in the Americas. It lasted longer, and destroyed
a greater percentage and possibly a greater total number of victims, than any genocide
in history.)
Specific intent is easy enough to adduce in the consistent tendency towards massacre
and physical extermination, evident from the earliest days of European conquest of
the Americas, Africa, Australasia, and other parts of the world. But in most or perhaps
all cases, this accounted for a minority of deaths among the colonized peoples.
The forced-labor institutions of Spanish America also demonstrated a high degree
of conscious intent. When slaves are dying like flies before your eyes, after only a few
months down the mines or on the plantations, and your response is not to alter con-
ditions but to feed more human lives into the inferno, this is “first-degree” genocide
(in Ward Churchill’s conceptualizing; see Chapter 1, note 48). The mechanisms of
death were not appreciably different from those of many Nazi slave-labor camps.
Disease was the greatest killer. Here, a lesser – but by no means insignificant –
degree of intent obtained. There is little doubt about the genocidal intent underlying
conscious biological warfare against Indian nations. A lesser but still substantial degree
of intent also featured in the numerous cases where disease was exacerbated by mal-
nutrition, overwork, and outright enslavement.
70
In some cases, though, entire Indian
nations were virtually wiped out by pathogens before they had ever set eyes on a
European. In addition, many of the connections between hygiene, overcrowding, and
the spread of disease were poorly understood for much of the period of the attack
on indigenous peoples. Concepts of second- and third-degree genocide would seem
to apply here.
Further complexity arises in the agents of the killing. Genocide studies emphasizes
the role of the state as the central agent of genocide, and one certainly finds a great
deal of state-planned, state-sponsored, and state-directed killing of indigenous
peoples. In many and perhaps most cases, however, the direct perpetrators of genocide
were colonial settlers rather than those in authority. Indeed, as in Australia, settlers
often protested the alleged lack of state support and assistance in confronting
the “savages” on the frontier. To the extent that policies were proposed to halt the
destruction of native peoples, it was often those in authority who proposed them,
though effective measures were rarely implemented. Measures were taken, as at
Flinders Island, to “protect” and “preserve” aboriginal groups, but often these actually
contributed to the genocidal process. As Colin Tatz has pointed out, “nowhere does
the [Genocide] Convention implicitly or explicitly rule out intent with
bona fides,
good faith, ‘for their own good’ or ‘in their best interests.’”
71
Helpful here might be Tony Barta’s concept of the “genocidal society – as distinct
from a genocidal state.” This is defined as a society “in which the whole bureaucratic
GENOCIDES OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLES
83
apparatus might officially be directed to protect innocent people but in which a
whole race is nevertheless subject to remorseless pressures of destruction inherent in
the very nature of the society.”
72
The nature of settler colonialism, in other words,
made conflict with native peoples, and their eventual large-scale destruction, almost
inevitable. State authorities, though they might occasionally have decried more
wanton acts of violence against natives, were above all concerned with ensuring that
the colonial or post-colonial endeavor succeeded. If the near-annihilation of the
indigenous population was the result, this was sometimes lamented (perhaps with
romantic and nostalgic overtones, as described in Brantlinger’s Dark Vanishings), but
it was never remotely sufficient to warrant the cancellation or serious revision of the
enterprise.
73
A few other ambiguous features of genocides against indigenous peoples may be
cited. First, the prevailing elite view of history has tended to underestimate the role
of the millions of people who migrated from the colonial metropole to the “New
World.” These settlers and/or administrators were critical to the unfolding of the
genocides, not only through the diseases they carried, but (notably in Australasia)
through the massacres they authorized and implemented.
74
It should not be for-
gotten, however, that many of them were fleeing religious persecution or desperate
material want. Think of the millions of Irish who abandoned their homeland during
the Great Hunger of 1846–48, or the English convicts shipped off for minor crimes
to penal colonies and barren, disease-ridden settlements in the Antipodes. Settlers
and administrators often suffered dreadful mortality rates. As with the indigenous
population, death usually resulted from exposure to pathogens to which they had
no resistance. To cite an extreme example, “it is said that 6,040 died out of the total
of 7,289 immigrants who had come to Virginia by February, 1625, or around 83
percent.”
75
Elsewhere, “tropical maladies turn[ed] assignments to military stations,
missions, or government posts into death watches.”
76
Finally, we should be careful not to romanticize indigenous peoples and their
societies prior to the European invasion. To limit the discussion to the Americas:
it was broadly true that genocide, and war unto genocide, featured only rarely. War
among North American Indian communities (excluding present-day Mexico) was
generally “farre lesse bloudy and devouring than the cruell Warres of Europe,” as a
European observer put it.
77
The Iroquois expansion into Huron territories in the
seventeenth century is an exception, but mass violence was far more pervasive
in Central America and Mexico, at least during certain periods. In the classic era of
Mayan civilization (600–900
CE
), war seems to have been waged with frequency and
sometimes incessantly; many scholars now link endemic conflict to the collapse of the
great Mayan cities, and the classical civilization along with it. The Aztecs of Mexico,
meanwhile, warred to capture prisoners for religious sacrifice, sometimes thousands
at a time, at their great temple in Tenochtitlán (now Mexico City). The Aztecs so
ravaged and alienated surrounding nations that these subjects enthusiastically joined
with invading Spanish forces to destroy them.
This pattern of collaboration with the conquering force, often arising from and
exacerbating the tensions of indigenous international relations, was quite common
throughout the hemisphere. Soon Indians, too, became willing participants in
genocidal wars against other Indian nations – and sometimes against members of
GENOCIDES OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLES
84
the colonizing society as well. Reference has already been made (Chapter 1) to
subaltern genocide, in which oppressed peoples adopt genocidal strategies against their
oppressors. Latin America offers several notable examples, studied in detail by
Nicholas Robins in his book Native Insurgencies and the Genocidal Impulse in the
Americas.
78
The millenarian “Great Rebellion” in Upper Peru (Bolivia) in the 1780s
aimed explicitly to slaughter or expel all white people from the former Inca realm.
In Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula in the mid-nineteenth century, Mayan Indians rose
in revolt to extirpate the territory’s whites or drive them into the sea.
79
In both cases,
the genocidal project advanced some distance before the whites launched a successful
(and genocidal) counter-attack. I believe we can sympathize with the enormous and
often mortal pressure placed upon indigenous peoples, while still recognizing that a
genocidal counter-strategy sometimes resulted.
■
INDIGENOUS REVIVAL
As the case study of Guatemala demonstrated, assaults on indigenous peoples –
including outright genocide – are by no means confined to distant epochs. According
to Ken Coates, “the era from the start of World War II through to the 1960s . . . [was]
an era of unprecedented aggression in the occupation of indigenous lands and, backed
by the equally unprecedented wealth and power of the industrial world, the systematic
dislocation of thousands of indigenous peoples around the world.”
80
In many regions,
invasions and occupations by settlers and multinational corporations, seeking to
exploit indigenous lands and resources, continue to the present.
No less than in past periods, however, invasion and attempted domination have
fueled indigenous resistance. In recent decades, for the first time, this has assumed the
form of a global mobilization of indigenous peoples. The “indigenous revival”
is closely linked to movements for decolonization that transformed world politics in
the twentieth century. It also reflects the development of human-rights philosophies
and legislation – particularly in the fertile period following the Second World War,
when numerous rights instruments were developed (including the UN Genocide
Convention). Decolonization brought to fruition the pledges of self-determination
that had featured in the charter of the League of Nations, but had withered in the
face of opposition from colonial powers such as Britain, France, and the Netherlands.
But this was liberation from domination by external colonial forces. What of soci-
eties that were or had become formally independent as nation-states, but where a
“pigmentocracy” of (usually) white people ruled over masses of displaced, exploited,
and marginalized indigenous peoples? As Ronald Niezen points out, the horrors of
the Nazi era in Europe “contributed to a greater receptiveness at the international level
to measures for the protection of minorities,” given the increasing recognition “that
states could not always be relied upon to protect their own citizens, that states could
even pass laws to promote domestic policies of genocide.”
81
At the same time as this
realization was gaining ground, so was an acceptance among the diverse colonized
peoples that they were members of a global indigenous class. The United Nations,
which in 1960 declared self-determination to be a human right, became a powerful
forum for the expression of indigenous aspirations, particularly with the creation in
GENOCIDES OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLES
85
1982 of a Working Group on Indigenous Populations in the UN Economic and
Social Council (ECOSOC). Attending a session of the working group, Mick Dodson,
an Australian aboriginal representative, described his dawning recognition that “We
were all part of a world community of Indigenous peoples spanning the planet;
experiencing the same problems and struggling against the same alienation, margin-
alisation and sense of powerlessness.”
82
An event of great significance in the Western hemisphere was the first Continental
Indigenous International Convention, held in Quito, Ecuador in July 1990, and
“attended by four hundred representatives from 120 indigenous nations and organi-
zations.”
83
Simultaneously, the number of non-governmental organizations (NGOs)
grew exponentially, so that by 2000 the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights
could cite some 441 organizations of indigenous peoples worldwide. And indigenous
peoples in many parts of the world strove to use the “master’s tools” – the educational
and legal systems of the dominant society – to reclaim the lands, political rights, and
cultural autonomy stripped from them by their colonial conquerors.
At the national level, the impact of these movements is increasingly far-reaching.
In the United States, an ever-greater number of individuals are choosing to self-
identify as Native Americans,
84
and more and more native nations are petitioning
for federal recognition; an “Indigenous Peoples’ Day” has supplanted Columbus
Day in some US cities. In Latin America, the impact has been more dramatic still.
Indigenous peoples in Ecuador and Bolivia have “converged in mass mobilizations,
breathtaking in their scale and determination,” that overthrew governments and
ushered in “a new revolutionary moment in which indigenous actors have acquired
the leading role.”
85
In Mexico on January 1, 1994, indigenous peoples in the poverty-
stricken southern state of Chiapas rose up in revolt against central authorities – the
so-called Zapatista rebellion – protesting the disastrous impact on the native economy
of cheap, subsidized corn exports from the US under the recently signed North
American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The Zapatistas have since established
substantial local autonomy in their zone of control. “Even on the outskirts of Mexico
City, about 100,000 Nahuatl Indians, descended from the Aztecs, have set up 12
indigenous communities and are demanding that the government recognize their
autonomy.”
86
Finally, in Guatemala – the country that witnessed the Western hemisphere’s worst
twentieth-century genocide – the Mayan Indian movement emerged from the
genocide of the late 1970s and early 1980s with renewed vigor and conviction.
87
The
country’s Mayan populations won the right to be educated in their own languages,
and filed high-profile legal cases against racist discrimination; in 2000 a Mayan
woman, Otilia Lux de Cotí, became the first Indian cabinet minister (for culture and
sports) in the country’s history. “There has been a very heartening change in the
public’s sense of what is right,” stated Tani Adams of the CIRMA think-tank in
Guatemala City. “Things are changing very fast in Guatemala. Churches, the state,
the media, everyone knows this issue has to be dealt with.”
88
However, the changes
took place against a backdrop of continued dire poverty and social marginalization
for the majority of Guatemalan Maya, and the pernicious racism of the dominant
society. This is a combination familiar to indigenous peoples worldwide, and a basis
for the claim, advanced by some, that genocide continues today.
89
GENOCIDES OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLES
86
■
FURTHER STUDY
Patrick Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races,
1800–1930. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003. Examines European
attitudes towards “primitive” races and their extinction.
Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West.
New York: Owl Books, 2001. First published in 1971, and still the classic
introduction to the native North American experience.
GENOCIDES OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLES
87
Figure 3.3 “The Maya Zone
is not an ethnographic
museum, it is a people on
the march.” A mural
celebrating the indigenous
revival in Yucatán, Mexico.
It adorns a museum wall in
Puerto Felipe Carrillo,
formerly Chan Santa
Cruz, capital of the
semi-independent Mayan
kingdom established after
the genocidal Caste War of
1847–48 (see pp. 29, 85).
Source: Author’s photo, 2002.
Bartolomé de las Casas, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies. London:
Penguin, 1992. First published in 1552: a Spanish friar’s unrelenting description
of colonial depredations in the Americas.
Alfred A. Cave, The Pequot War. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press,
1996. Definitive work on the Pequot genocide.
Ward Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas,
1492 to the Present. San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books, 1997. Forceful
polemic, with attention to genocide as a legal and academic concept.
Ken S. Coates, A Global History of Indigenous Peoples: Struggle and Survival.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. A solid introduction, especially good on
the Second World War and the postwar era.
Mark Cocker, Rivers of Blood, Rivers of Gold: Europe’s Conquest of Indigenous Peoples.
New York: Grove Press, 2001. Comprehensive survey, ranging from the Americas
to Africa and Australasia.
Mary Crow Dog with Richard Erdoes, Lakota Woman. New York: HarperPerennial,
1991. Rich memoir by a Native American activist.
Richard Drinnon, Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian Hating and Empire
Building. New York: Schocken Books, 1990. The racist ideology underlying US
wars against American Indians, Filipinos, and Indochinese.
Jan-Bart Gewald, Herero Heroes: A Socio-political History of the Herero of Namibia,
1890–1923. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2001. Study of the Herero
genocide and its aftermath.
Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of
Conquest. New York: W.W. Norton, 1975. Early, widely cited account of the
formative period of white–Indian interaction in North America.
Sven Lindqvist, “Exterminate All the Brutes”: One Man’s Odyssey into the Heart
of Darkness and the Origins of European Genocide. New York: The New Press,
1996. Epigrammatic meditation on the links between colonialism and Nazi
genocide.
Rigoberta Menchú with Elisabeth Burgos-Débray, I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian
Woman in Guatemala. New York: Verso, 1987. Memoir, by the Nobel Peace
Prize-winner, of her family’s experience in the genocide against Mayan Indians.
MariJo Moore, ed., Genocide of the Mind: New Native American Writing.New York:
Thunder’s Mouth Press/Nation Books, 2003. Soul-searching reflections by native
writers.
Alan Moorehead, The Fatal Impact: The Invasion of the South Pacific, 1767–1840.
New York: HarperCollins, 1990. First published in 1966, this remains a moving
introduction to the devastation of Pacific indigenous peoples.
A. Dirk Moses, ed., Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen
Indigenous Children in Australian History. New York: Berghahn Books, 2004.
Seminal collection of essays.
Ronald Niezen, The Origins of Indigenism: Human Rights and the Politics of Identity.
Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003. The growth of contemporary
indigenous identities and movements.
Nicholas Robins, Native Insurgencies and the Genocidal Impulse in the Americas.
Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2005. Ground-breaking study of
GENOCIDES OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLES
88
Indian millenarian movements that adopted genocidal strategies against the
European invader.
David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World.New York:
Oxford University Press, 1992. Perhaps the most enduring of the works
published for the Columbus quincentenary.
Russell Thornton, American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History since
1492. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990. Foundational text on
the demographic impact of European conquest and colonization.
Daniel Wilkinson, Silence on the Mountain: Stories of Terror, Betrayal, and Forgetting
in Guatemala. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2002. Intimate glimpse of
upheaval in Mayan Indian communities during the genocide; usefully read
alongside Menchú (see above).
James Wilson, The Earth Shall Weep: A History of Native America. New York: Atlantic
Monthly Press, 1998. Fine overview of the native experience in North America.
Ronald Wright, Stolen Continents: The “New World” Through Indian Eyes. Boston,
MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1993. Examines the conquest throughout the Western
hemisphere from the perspective of its victims.
Geoffrey York, The Dispossessed: Life and Death in Native Canada. London: Vintage
UK, 1990. Harrowing journalistic account of poverty and cultural dislocation
among Canada’s native peoples.
■
NOTES
1 For concise overviews, see Robert K. Hitchcock and Tara M. Twedt, “Physical and
Cultural Genocide of Various Indigenous Peoples,” in Samuel Totten et al., eds, Century
of Genocide: Eyewitness Accounts and Critical Views (New York: Garland Publishing,
1997), pp. 372–407; and Elazar Barkan, “Genocides of Indigenous Peoples: Rhetoric
of Human Rights,” in Robert Gellately and Ben Kiernan, eds, The Specter of Genocide:
Mass Murder in Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003),
pp. 117–40.
2 Ronald Niezen, The Origins of Indigenism: Human Rights and the Politics of Identity
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003), p. 18.
3 Quoted in Niezen, The Origins of Indigenism, p. 20.
4 However, some have criticized definitions that emphasize colonialism as being too
Eurocentric, denying agency to indigenous peoples, and overlooking imperial conquests
by non-Western societies. See, e.g., Ken S. Coates, A Global History of Indigenous Peoples:
Struggle and Survival (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 8–9.
5 See Benjamin Madley, “Patterns of Frontier Genocide, 1803–1910: The Aboriginal
Tasmanians, the Yuki of California, and the Herero of Namibia,” Journal of Genocide
Research, 4: 2 (2004), p. 168.
6 Sven Lindqvist, “Exterminate All the Brutes”: One Man’s Odyssey into the Heart of Darkness
and the Origins of European Genocide (New York: The New Press, 1996), p. 123.
7 Twain quoted in Patrick Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of
Primitive Races, 1800–1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), p. 10. Twain’s
complete essay on “The Noble Red Man,” originally published in The Galaxy in 1870,
is available on the Web at http://www.twainquotes.com/Galaxy/187009c.html.
8 Wallace quoted in Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings, pp. 185–86.
9 Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings, p. 186.
10 Lindqvist, “Exterminate All the Brutes,” p. 9.
GENOCIDES OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLES
89
11 Richard L. Rubenstein, The Age of Triage: Fear and Hope in an Overcrowded World
(Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1983), p. 1.
12 Ward Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas, 1492
to the Present (San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books, 1997), p. 97.
13 Russel Lawrence Barsh points to the concentration of Indians on “reservations” (a system
that “undoubtedly brought chronic malnutrition to a great proportion of North
America’s indigenous population”), destruction of forests, and denial of access to clean
water as additional factors promoting high Indian mortality (his analysis concentrates on
the later nineteenth century). See Barsh, “Ecocide, Nutrition, and the ‘Vanishing
Indian,’” in Pierre L. van den Berghe, ed., State Violence and Ethnicity (Niwot, CO:
University Press of Colorado, 1990), pp. 224, 231, 239.
14 See Elizabeth A. Fenn, “Biological Warfare in Eighteenth-century North America: Beyond
Jeffery Amherst,” The Journal of American History, 86: 4 (March 2000), pp. 1552–80.
15 On the North American variant, see Tony Seybert, “Slavery and Native Americans in
British North America and the United States: 1600 to 1865,” http://www.slavery
inamerica.org/history/hs_es_indians_slavery.htm.
16 David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 54.
17 Bartolomé de las Casas, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (London: Penguin,
1992), p. 15.
18 De las Casas, A Short Account, p. 24.
19 James Wilson, The Earth Shall Weep: A History of Native America (New York: Atlantic
Monthly Press, 1998), p. 34.
20 Wilson, The Earth Shall Weep, p. 35.
21 Stannard, American Holocaust, p. 89.
22 Russell Thornton, American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History since
1492 (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987), p. 44.
23 Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide, p. 97.
24 Testimony cited in Thornton, American Indian Holocaust and Survival, p. 95.
25 Thornton, American Indian Holocaust and Survival, p. 51.
26 Wilson, The Earth Shall Weep, p. 283; see also Coates, A Global History, p. 128.
27 Thornton, American Indian Holocaust and Survival, p. 47.
28 For a summary of the Pequot War, see “‘We Must Burn Them,’” ch. 13 in Francis
Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (New
York: W.W. Norton, 1975), pp. 202–27.
29 Wilson, The Earth Shall Weep, p. 94.
30 Chivington quoted in Michael Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic
Cleansing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 98.
31 Connor quoted in Wilson, The Earth Shall Weep, p. 274.
32 Roosevelt quoted in Paul R. Bartrop, “Punitive Expeditions and Massacres: Gippsland,
Colorado, and the Question of Genocide,” in A. Dirk Moses, ed., Genocide and Settler
Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History (New York:
Berghahn Books, 2004), p. 209.
33 Wilson, The Earth Shall Weep, p. 228.
34 These figures were provided by Benjamin Madley, a leading authority on the Yuki
genocide.
35 Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn, The History and Sociology of Genocide (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 1990), pp. 197–99.
36 Wilson, The Earth Shall Weep, pp. 228, 231.
37 “The Trail Where They Cried,” in the Cherokee translation (Coates, A Global History,
p. 185). For a detailed account, see John Ehle, Trail of Tears: The Rise and Fall of the
Cherokee Nation (New York: Doubleday, 1988).
38 Ward Churchill, “Genocide by Any Other Name: North American Indian Residential
Schools in Context,” in Adam Jones, ed., Genocide, War Crimes and the West: History and
Complicity (London: Zed Books, 2004), p. 87.
GENOCIDES OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLES
90
39 Canada’s Ministry of National Health and Welfare cited evidence in 1993 that “100%
of the children at some [residential] schools were sexually abused between 1950 and
1980” (The Globe and Mail); in the United States a “wall of silence” still surrounds this
subject. Churchill, “Genocide by Any Other Name,” pp. 104–5.
40 Churchill, “Genocide by Any Other Name,” p. 97.
41 Churchill, “Genocide by Any Other Name,” pp. 105–6.
42 The coup, and its prelude and aftermath, have been well studied as a paradigmatic case
of US interventionism. The classic account is Stephen C. Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer,
Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala, expanded edn (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). See also Richard H. Immerman, The CIA
in Guatemala: The Foreign Policy of Intervention (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press,
1982), and, on the aftermath, Stephen M. Streeter, Managing the Counterrevolution:
The United States and Guatemala, 1954–1961 (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press,
2000).
43 “Despite his aw-shucks style, Reagan found virtually every anti-communist action
justified, no matter how brutal. From his eight years in the White House, there is no
historical indication that he was troubled by the bloodbath and even genocide that
occurred in Central America during his presidency, while he was shipping hundreds of
millions of dollars in military aid to the implicated forces.” Robert Parry, “Reagan and
Guatemala’s Death Files,” in William L. Hewitt, ed., Defining the Horrific: Readings on
Genocide and Holocaust in the Twentieth Century (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson
Education, 2004), p. 247. Very little of this surfaced in the nauseating encomiums to
Reagan following his death in 2004.
44 Menchú’s autobiography (Rigoberta Menchú with Elisabeth Burgos-Débray, I, Rigoberta
Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala [New York: Verso, 1987]) is a classic of
indigenous literature, though controversy has attended some of the personal history that
Menchú recounts – a notable case of the struggle over history and memory examined in
Chapter 14. For an overview, see Arturo Arias, ed., The Rigoberta Menchú Controversy
(Bloomington, MN: Minnesota University Press, 2001).
45 Guatemala: Memory of Silence: Report of the Commission for Historical Clarification,
February 1999, http://shr.aaas.org/guatemala/ceh/report/english/conc2.html.
46 Quoted in Mireysa Navarro, “Guatemalan Army Waged ‘Genocide,’ New Report Finds,”
New York Times, February 26, 1999; reprinted in Hewitt, ed., Defining the Horrific,
pp. 255–58 (quoted passage from p. 256).
47 “Whites spoke of Aborigines as ‘horribly disgusting,’ lacking ‘any traces of civilization,’
‘constituting in a measure the link between the man and the monkey tribe,’ or
‘undoubtedly in the lowest possible scale of human nature, both in form and intellect.’”
Madley, “Patterns of Frontier Genocide,” p. 169.
48 Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy, p. 80.
49 Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy, p. 81.
50 Colin Tatz, “Genocide in Australia,” AIATSIS Research Discussion Papers No. 8, 1999,
http://www.aiatsis.gov.au/rsrch/rsrch_dp/genocide.htm.
51 Trollope quoted in Mark Cocker, Rivers of Blood, Rivers of Gold: Europe’s Conquest of
Indigenous Peoples (New York: Grove Press, 2001), p. 178.
52 The exterminatory character of the Flinders system was acknowledged in 1999 by the
Tasmanian Premier, Jim Bacon, who referred to the Wybalenna concentration camp as
“a site of genocide.” Quoted in Madley, “Patterns of Frontier Genocide,” p. 175. Madley
adds (p. 176): “From the outset, British authorities knew that conditions on Flinders
Island were lethal. Inaction despite clear warnings and high mortality rates suggests that
population decline was government policy, or was considered preferable to returning the
survivors to their homes. . . . In 1836 the commander of Launceston visited Flinders
Island and warned that if conditions were not improved, ‘the race of Tasmania...will
. . . be extinct in a quarter of a century.’ . . . Still, the government did not address the
issues contributing to mortalities. In fact, they operated Flinders Island with virtually no
policy amendments for over a decade, until closing the reserve in 1847. The colonial
GENOCIDES OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLES
91
government may not have planned to kill large numbers of Aborigines on Flinders Island,
but they did little to stop mass death when they were clearly responsible for it.”
53 Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings, pp. 129–30, citing the work of Lyndall Ryan. See also
Cocker, Rivers of Blood, Rivers of Gold, pp. 181–84.
54 Peter Read, The Stolen Generations: The Removal of Aboriginal Children in NSW,
1883–1969 (Sydney: Government Printer, 1982); revised edition available on the Web
at http://www.daa.nsw.gov.au/publications/25.html.
55 Tatz, “Genocide in Australia.” A quite extraordinary role in alerting white Australians to
the aboriginal plight was played by the rock group Midnight Oil. The group’s signature
hit, “Beds Are Burning” (from Diesel and Dust, 1987), helped define the land-rights issue
for the white majority. They also sang about aboriginal territories irradiated by UK
nuclear testing in the 1950s (“Maralinga,” 1984) and the fate of the Tasmanian
aboriginals (“Truganini,” from Earth and Sun and Moon, 1993). On their first North
American tour, an aboriginal band, Yothu Yindi, memorably opened the show. The lead
singer of “The Oils,” Peter Garrett (a lawyer by training), was elected a Labor Member
of Parliament in the 2004 federal election.
56 Colin Tatz, With Intent to Destroy: Reflecting on Genocide (London: Verso, 2003), p. xvi.
57 For a solid overview, see Jon Bridgman and Leslie J. Worley, “Genocide of the Hereros,”
ch. 1 in Totten et al., eds, Century of Genocide, pp. 3–40.
58 Von Trotha quoted in Cocker, Rivers of Blood, Rivers of Gold, p. 328.
59 Von Trotha quoted in Jan-Bart Gewald, “Imperial Germany and the Herero of Southern
Africa: Genocide and the Quest for Recompense,” in Jones, ed., Genocide, War Crimes
and the West, p. 61.
60 Quoted in Gewald, “Imperial Germany and the Herero,” p. 62.
61 Madley, “Patterns of Frontier Genocide,” p. 188; Benjamin Madley, “From Africa
to Auschwitz: How German South West Africa Incubated Ideas and Methods Adopted
and Developed by the Nazis in Eastern Europe,” European History Quarterly, 35: 3
(2005), p. 181.
62 Benjamin Madley, personal communication, September 30, 2005. pp. 429–64.
63 Andrew Meldrum, “German Minister Says Sorry for Genocide in Namibia,” Guardian,
August 16, 2004, http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,4993918-103532,00.html.
64 In academia, the denialist position is associated with scholars such as Steven Katz,
Guenter Lewy, William Rubinstein, and (in Australia) Keith Windschuttle.
65 Alexander Bielakowski, post to H-Genocide, September 26, 2001; see my response of the
same date in the H-Genocide archives, http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=
lmandlist=H-Genocide.
66 Michael Burleigh, Ethics and Extermination: Reflections on Nazi Genocide (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 181.
67 Christopher Hitchens, “Minority Report,” The Nation, October 19, 1992, emphasis
added. Hitchens’ “vulgar social Darwinism, with its quasi-Hitlerian view of the proper
role of power in history” is effectively pilloried in David E. Stannard’s essay, “Uniqueness
as Denial: The Politics of Genocide Scholarship,” in Alan S. Rosenbaum, ed., Is the
Holocaust Unique? Perspectives on Comparative Genocide (2nd edn) (Boulder, CO:
Westview Press, 2001), pp. 245–90 (on Hitchens, p. 248).
A personal confession: I identified with such viewpoints until a little over a decade ago,
when I was slapped rudely awake by Geoffrey York’s book The Dispossessed: Life and
Death in Native Canada (London: Vintage UK, 1990). I now believe that this outlook
represented a deep failure of moral imagination on my part. Probably, it was grounded
in the same factors that seem to inform the comments of Hitchens and others: ignorance;
cultural hubris; and discomfort at acknowledging genocide perpetrated by one’s “own”
people.
68 Wilson, The Earth Shall Weep, p. xx.
69 Benjamin Madley, personal conversation, August 16, 2005.
70 See Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other (New York:
Harper Perennial, 1992), pp. 135–38.
GENOCIDES OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLES
92
71 Tatz, With Intent to Destroy, p. 99.
72 Tony Barta, “Relations of Genocide: Land and Lives in the Colonization of Australia,”
in Isidor Wallimann and Michael N. Dobkowski, eds, Genocide and the Modern Age:
Etiology and Case Studies of Mass Death (Westport, CT: Syracuse University Press, 2000),
p. 240.
73 Another sophisticated analysis of the issues of agency and intent is A. Dirk Moses, “An
Antipodean Genocide? The Origins of the Genocidal Moment in the Colonization of
Australia,” Journal of Genocide Research, 2: 1 (2000), pp. 89–106.
74 For example – to cite a case where colonial administrators have often been credited with
seeking to prevent or impede genocide against indigenous peoples – the Lieutenant
Governor of Tasmania, Sir George Arthur, imposed martial law in the territory in 1828.
He called for “the most energetic measures on the part of the settlers themselves,” though
adding that “the use of arms is in no case to be resorted to until other measures for driving
them off have failed.” As Benjamin Madley notes, “Martial law made killing Aborigines
legal until they had all been ‘driven off,’ resulting, within a year of the issuing of the
decree, in the slaughter of over two-thirds of Tasmania’s Aboriginal population.” Madley,
“Patterns of Frontier Genocide,” p. 174.
75 Thornton, American Indian Holocaust and Survival, p. 69.
76 Coates, A Global History, p. 132.
77 Roger Williams, quoted in Wilson, The Earth Shall Weep, p. 55. Writes G.B. Nash:
“The nature of pre-contact Indian war was far different than the wars known in Europe,
both in duration and in scale of operations. Unlike the Europeans, Native Americans
could not conceive of total war that was fought for months or even years, that did
not spare non-combatants, and that involved the systematic destruction of towns and
food supplies. Wars among Indians were conducted more in the manner of short forays,
with small numbers of warriors engaging the enemy and one or the other side with-
drawing after a few casualties had been inflicted.” Quoted in Jeffrey P. Blick, “Genocidal
Warfare in Tribal Societies as a Result of European-induced Culture Conflict,” Man,
New Series, 23: 4 (1988), p. 658. See also “Savage War,” ch. 9 in Jennings, The Invasion
of America, pp. 146–70, pointing (among other things) to the extent to which Europeans
themselves imported methods of warfare that were subsequently depicted as “savage”
customs.
78 Nicholas Robins, Native Insurgencies and the Genocidal Impulse in the Americas
(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2005).
79 See Nelson Reed, The Caste War of Yucatan (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
1964).
80 Coates, A Global History, pp. 226–27. See also the case of the Aché Indians of Paraguay,
described in one of the early treatises of genocide studies: Richard Arens, Genocide in
Paraguay (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1976), perhaps most cited today
for the epilogue by Jewish Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel.
81 Niezen, The Origins of Indigenism, p. 40.
82 Quoted in Niezen, The Origins of Indigenism, p. 47.
83 Elazar Barkan, The Guilt of Nations: Restitution and Negotiating Historical Injustices (New
York: W.W. Norton, 2000), p. 161.
84 For a survey of the trend, see Jack Hitt, “The Newest Indians,” New York Times
Magazine, August 21, 2005.
85 “Bolivia Fights Back: An Introduction,” and Forrest Hylton and Sinclair Thomson,
“Insurgent Bolivia,” both in NACLA Report on the Americas, November to December
2004, pp. 14–15.
86 Hector Tobar, “Across the Americas, Indigenous Peoples Make Themselves Heard,” Los
Angeles Times, October 19, 2003.
87 For a synoptic treatment of the Mayan resurgence, see Edward F. Fischer and R.
McKenna Brown, eds, Maya Cultural Activism in Guatemala (Austin, TX: University of
Texas Press, 1996).
88 Quoted in Catherine Elton, “Guatemala Faces Its Racist Issues,” The Herald
GENOCIDES OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLES
93
(International Edition), October 28, 2004. Niezen’s The Origins of Indigenism provides
a broad, up-to-date overview of the strategies and accomplishments of indigenous
movements worldwide.
89 For example, Ward Churchill notes that US Indians in the contemporary era “incur by
far the lowest annual and lifetime incomes of any group...and the highest rates of infant
mortality, death by malnutrition, exposure, and plague disease. Such conditions produce
the sort of endemic despair that generates chronic alcoholism and other forms of
substance abuse among more than half the native population – factors contributing not
only to further erosion in physical health but to very high accident rates – as well as rates
of teen suicide up to 14.5 times the national average....‘Genocidal’ is the only
reasonable manner in which to describe the imposition, as a matter of policy, of such
physiocultural effects upon any target group.” Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide, pp.
247–48. Conditions among Australian aboriginals are strikingly similar: this group
“ended the twentieth century at the very top, or bottom, of every social indicator
available.” See the statistics cited in Tatz, With Intent to Destroy, pp. 104–5.
GENOCIDES OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLES
94
BOX 3A TIBET UNDER CHINESE RULE
Imperialism and colonialism have been inflicted on indigenous peoples
throughout the “Third World.” However, countries in the developing world
are themselves often the product of imperial expansion and domination. In both
pre-modern and contemporary incarnations, these states have proved willing
to use imperial and colonial strategies against indigenous peoples within their
reach. As with Western imperialism, the enterprise has regularly spawned
genocidal atrocities. Chinese rule over Tibet is a case in point.
We should distinguish at the outset between two versions of Tibet that are
often confused. Ethnic Tibet – the area in which self-identified Tibetans reside
– covers more or less the area of the Tibetan plateau, a zone dominated by
grassland that is also “the source of the world’s ten greatest river systems,”
1
but
this includes the areas of Amdo and Kham (often referred to as “eastern Tibet”).
These were traditionally under the control of warlords more beholden to the
Han Chinese center than to the Tibetan authorities in U-tsang, central Tibet –
with its capital at Lhasa, home to the supreme religious authority, the Dalai
Lama. “Tibet” today is generally taken – except by Tibetans – to refer to the
Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) declared by China in 1965. This constitutes
barely half the territory of ethnic Tibet, while the more populous territories of
“Outer Tibet” (including Amdo and Kham) are mostly divided between the
Chinese provinces of Sichuan and Qinghai. Although home to about half of all
ethnic Tibetans, these provinces are populated by a Han Chinese majority, and
the demographic disproportion is increasing.
2
Historically, Tibet was itself the product of empire-building, and for 300
years (seventh to tenth centuries
CE
) was one of the most powerful states in Asia.
Although Tibet’s Buddhist lamas were pressured into an enduring tribute
relationship with the Mongol and Manchu emperors of China from the
thirteenth to the twentieth century, not until after the Manchu collapse in 1911
GENOCIDES OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLES
95
was Tibet actually declared part of the Chinese state, but the Nationalist regime
that made the declaration was never in a position to enforce it. From 1911 to
1950, “the Tibetan Government exercised internal and external freedom, which
clearly demonstrated the country’s independence.”
3
To justify their invasion of eastern Tibet in 1950, the communist Chinese
government depicted pre-occupation Tibet as “a hell on earth ravaged by feudal
exploitation,” with rapacious monks oppressing a cowed and impoverished
peasant population.
4
The real picture was more complex. Tibet was authori-
tarian, with a powerful monastic class that exacted high taxes from the laboring
population. Supporters of Tibetan nationalism acknowledge that “traditional
Tibetan society – like most of its Asian contemporaries – was backward and
badly in need of reforms.” But there was no hereditary rule. The supreme
authority, the Dalai Lama, was chosen from the ordinary population as the
reincarnation of his predecessor – an egalitarian strategy mirroring the upward
mobility that life as a monk could provide. In addition, the system was not truly
feudal: peasants “had a legal identity, often with documents stating their rights,
and also had access to courts of law,” including “the right to sue their masters.”
5
Peasant holdings appear to have provided adequate subsistence, with crop
failures and other agricultural emergencies offset by efficiently administered state
reserves.
During the Nationalist era, as noted above, Tibet was claimed but not admin-
istered by China. That changed dramatically in 1949–50, after Mao Zedong’s
Communist Party took power in Beijing. With rationales that ranged from
bringing civilization to the natives, to the need to counter moves by American
“hegemonists,” the Chinese government invaded and partially occupied Tibet
in October 1950. “Tibet’s frantic appeals for help to the United Nations, India,
Britain, and the United States were ignored, or rebuffed with diplomatic
evasions. No nation was about to challenge the new People’s Republic of China,
which had some ten million men under arms, over the fate of an obscure
mountain kingdom lost in the Himalayas.”
6
The logistical challenge of doing
so would also have been nightmarish.
In May 1951, China imposed a punitive treaty for the “peaceful liberation”
of the entire country. The so-called 17-Point Agreement guaranteed Tibetan
political, religious, and educational rights, but allowed troops of the People’s
Liberation Army (PLA) to enter the territory, and gave the Chinese control over
foreign affairs.
7
The Chinese also enjoyed a free hand in the eastern Tibetan
territories. They used it to impose communist measures such as collectivization
of agriculture. Rebellion against the measures was swift and violent among the
Tibetans of the east. The Chinese responded with much greater violence, killing
thousands of Tibetans and incarcerating tens of thousands under brutal and
torturous conditions.
When the spark of rebellion reached central Tibet, in 1959, it launched a
general uprising that the Chinese rapidly moved to suppress. The Dalai Lama
fled across the border into India, where he still resides in Dharamsala, presiding
GENOCIDES OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLES
96
over a Tibetan exile community.
8
In the aftermath of the rebellion, the Chinese
government instituted a regime of “struggle” against supposedly reactionary
elements. In scenes that evoke the proceedings in Cambodia under the Khmer
Rouge (see Chapter 7), communist cadres denounced, tortured, and frequently
executed “enemies of the people.” “These struggle sessions resulted in more than
92,000 deaths” out of a total Tibetan population of about six million people.
9
The killings may be seen as part of a genocidal strategy against Tibetans as a
whole, but also as an “eliticide,” targeting the better-educated and leadership-
oriented elements among the Tibetan population.
The Tibetan insurgency was a direct response to the Great Leap Forward
and the Cultural Revolution, two communist campaigns that turned China
upside down and killed millions or tens of millions. In 1958, Mao announced
the Great Leap, designed to accomplish in China what Stalin achieved in the
Soviet Union: industrialize a peasant nation in short order. At unfathomable
cost, Stalin succeeded in his goal (Chapter 5). But China’s Great Leap was an
unmitigated failure, as well as a human catastrophe. Deluded by fantasies of
agricultural “science” and peasant industrial potential, the communist authori-
ties announced massive grain surpluses. The surpluses were a fiction; local
authorities told the central authority what it wanted to hear. But as in Stalin’s
USSR, they served as the basis for grain seizures that provoked mass famine
– the worst in China’s long and famine-plagued history, “result[ing] in the
deaths of an estimated 40 million people in the three years between 1959 and
1962.”
10
No group suffered more than ethnic Tibetans; “perhaps one in five
died” between 1959 and 1963.
11
After the 1959 uprising, an equally catastrophic toll was inflicted by the
forced-labor camps of Qinghai and Sichuan, which swept up hundreds of
thousands of Tibetans, mostly adult males.
12
They were set to work extracting
Tibet’s precious minerals and building its military infrastructure, especially
roads and railways. Toiling at high, frozen altitudes and with minimal food
rations, tens of thousands of Tibetans died in the first half of the 1960s, in
conditions that rivaled the worst outposts of the Soviet Gulag. According
to Jean-Louis Margolin, “it appears that very few people (perhaps as few as
2 percent) ever returned alive from the 166 known camps, most of which were
in Tibet or the neighboring provinces.”
13
As during the Second World War in
the USSR, the death rate in the camps was exacerbated by the famine raging
outside their gates.
The second Chinese campaign to devastate Tibet was the “Great Proletarian
Cultural Revolution,” unleashed in 1966. Another decisive break with the
Chinese past was ordered. In Tibet, the epitome of “reaction” and “feudalism,”
persecution and destruction occurred on a vast scale:
From July 1966 onwards, Red Guards [communist militants] began the sys-
tematic destruction of Tibetan civilization. Monasteries, temples and other
GENOCIDES OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLES
97
holy sites such as Jokhang, Ramoche and Norbulingka were condemned as
breeding-grounds for counter-revolutionary notions and shut down, looted,
destroyed and even air-bombed. The historic monastery-towns of Drepung,
once the largest such Tibetan town with 10,000 monks, and Ganden, with
3000 monks, were obliterated. Statues, scriptures and ritual objects were
smashed, taken away or thrown into bonfires that burned for days. Religious
and cultural practices including folk fairs, festivals and traditional songs were
banned. Religious leaders were branded as “reactionary demons” and the
Dalai Lama as a “bandit and a traitor.” In the process, thousands of monks
were slaughtered.
14
The violence of the Cultural Revolution waned by 1969. Mao Zedong died in
1976, and the extremist phase of the Chinese revolution passed with him. The
1980s were marked by an opening up to the West which launched a remarkable
transformation of China’s economy and society, continuing today. This phase
has been characterized by a softening of China’s position towards Tibetan
national and cultural rights.
15
However, with increasing Han Chinese migration,
Tibetans have become a minority in their capital of Lhasa. Renewed ideological
campaigns, such as the “Strike Hard” and “Spiritual Civilization” initiatives,
have been aimed at the so-called “Dalai Clique” – notably representatives of
those Tibetan religious institutions that were allowed to revive after the Cultural
Revolution. Hundreds of monks and nuns have been arrested, and thousands
more expelled from their institutions.
Tibetan resistance continued beneath the surface, occasionally breaking out
into open revolt. In March 1989 there occurred “the largest anti-Chinese
demonstration in [Lhasa] since 1959.”
16
It was met by instant crack-downs,
mass round-ups, and the routine use of torture on Tibetan detainees. Shakya
describes the atmosphere in the wake of this outbreak as one of “general malaise”
characterized by “a near-universal enmity towards the Chinese” on the part of
ethnic Tibetans.
17
Overall, it seems likely that hundreds of thousands of Tibetans have died as
the direct result of Chinese actions since 1950, overwhelmingly in the decade
following the 1959 invasion. The Tibetan government-in-exile estimates
1.2 million deaths, but Jean-Louis Margolin, writing in The Black Book of
Communism, finds this “difficult to believe.” He calculates instead a death-toll
“as high as 800,000 – a scale of population loss comparable to that in Cambodia
under the Khmer Rouge” (see Chapter 7).
18
As early as 1960, the International Commission of Jurists declared that there
existed “a prima facie case that on the part of the Chinese, there has been an
attempt to destroy the national, ethnical, racial and religious group of Tibetans
by killing members of the group and causing serious bodily harm to members
of the group....These acts constitute the crime of genocide under the
Genocide Convention of the United Nations of 1948.”
19
Since then, supporters
of Tibetan self-determination have regularly deployed a genocide discourse –
GENOCIDES OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLES
98
for example, Maura Moynihan of Refugees International. Writing in The
Washington Post in 1998, Moynihan argued that Tibet was the victim of “a grimly
familiar, 20th-century, state-sponsored genocide, justified by a new, scientific-
materialist ideology of ‘reform’ and ‘progress,’ swiftly and efficiently enacted
with modern weaponry and just as swiftly and efficiently denied and con-
cealed.”
20
These claims are hotly disputed, however, by the Chinese government
and its supporters.
The response of Tibet’s government-in-exile to Chinese occupation has been
realistic and moderate. A five-point plan that the Dalai Lama presented in a
1987 speech to the US Congress included the following proposals:
1 Transformation of the whole of Tibet into a zone of peace.
2 Abandonment of China’s population transfer policy which threatens the very
existence of the Tibetan people.
3 Respect for the Tibetan people’s fundamental human rights and democratic
freedoms.
4 Restoration and protection of Tibet’s natural environment and the
abandonment of China’s use of Tibet for the production of nuclear weapons
and dumping of nuclear waste.
5 Commencement of earnest negotiations on the future status of Tibet and of
relations between the Tibetan and Chinese people.
21
The Dalai Lama has made it clear that Tibetans are willing to accept autonomy
within China, rather than full independence. Such an arrangement seems
remote, however, given China’s economic ambitions for Tibet, and its growing
military presence there.
■
FURTHER STUDY
Jasper Becker, Hungry Ghosts: Mao’s Secret Famine. New York: Henry Holt,
1998. Describes the catastrophe of Mao’s “Great Leap Forward,” with
particular attention to ethnic Tibetan suffering.
Central Tibetan Administration, Tibet Under Communist China – Fifty Years.
Available at http://www.tibet.net/publication/50yrs/report.html. A detailed
report by the Tibetan government-in-exile; partisan but well-researched,
and reflecting the government’s political moderation.
Mary Craig, Tears of Blood: A Cry for Tibet. Washington, DC: Counterpoint
Press, 2000. Impassioned overview of Tibet under Chinese rule.
Tsering Shakya, The Dragon in the Land of Snows: A History of Modern Tibet
Since 1947. New York: Penguin Compass, 2000. “The first scholarly history
of Tibet under Chinese occupation” (Time); objective and fair-minded.
GENOCIDES OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLES
99
■
NOTES
1 Central Tibetan Administration (hereafter, CTA), Tibet under Communist China –
Fifty Years (2001), http://www.tibet.net/eng/diir/pubs/rail_report.pdf, p. 54.
2 The distinction between “Outer Tibet” and “Inner Tibet” was first made in the
1913 to 1914 Simla Conference and Convention, in which Tibet, China, and
Britain participated. “Chinese suzerainty over the whole of Tibet was recognized
but China engaged not to convert Tibet into a Chinese province. The autonomy
of Outer Tibet was recognised and China agreed to abstain from interference in its
internal administration which was to rest with Tibetans themselves. In Inner Tibet
the central Tibetan Government at Lhasa was to retain its existing rights.” George
N. Patterson, “China and Tibet: Background to the Revolt,” The China Quarterly,
1 (January–March 1960), p. 90.
3 Tsering Shakya, The Dragon in the Land of Snows: A History of Modern Tibet since
1947 (New York: Penguin Compass, 2000), p. xxx.
4 Shakya, The Dragon in the Land of Snows, p. xxviii.
5 CTA, Tibet under Communist China, p. 130.
6 Eric S. Margolis, War at the Top of the World: The Struggle for Afghanistan, Kashmir,
and Tibet (New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 195.
7 See the full text of the “Agreement of the Central People’s Government and the
Local Government of Tibet on Measures for the Peaceful Liberation of Tibet” at
http://www.tibetinfo.net/publications/docs/spa.htm.
8 See Frank Morales, The Revolt in Tibet (New York: Macmillan, 1960).
9 CTA, Tibet under Communist China, p. 9.
10 Shakya, The Dragon in the Land of Snows, p. 262.
11 Jasper Becker, Hungry Ghosts: Mao’s Secret Famine (New York: Henry Holt, 1998),
p. 166.
12 Shakya refers to “areas where all able young men had been arrested and imprisoned,
leaving the villages inhabited only by old people and women.” The Dragon in the
Land of Snows, p. 271.
13 Jean-Louis Margolin, “China: A Long March into Night,” in Stéphane Courtois et
al., The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, trans. Jonathan
Murphy and Mark Kramer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999),
p. 545.
14 “The Cultural Revolution and Its Legacy in Tibet,” http://www.columbia.edu/
cu/ccba/cear/issues/spring98/text-only/hennsidebar2.htm.
15 For an overview of this period, see Solomon M. Karmel, “Ethnic Tension and the
Struggle for Order: China’s Policies in Tibet,” Pacific Affairs, 68 (Winter 1995–96),
pp. 485–505.
16 Shakya, The Dragon in the Land of Snows, p. 430.
17 Shakya, The Dragon in the Land of Snows, p. 421.
18 Margolin, “China,” p. 546.
19 Quoted in Shakya, The Dragon in the Land of Snows, p. 223; see the “ICJ Report
on Tibet 1960,” http://www.tibet.com/Resolution/icj60.html.
20 Maura Moynihan, “Genocide in Tibet,” The Washington Post, January 25, 1998.
Tibetan nationalists have often alleged that China is guilty of another strategy of
genocide under the terms of the UN Convention: preventing Tibetan births
through forcible sterilization of Tibetan women. However, the evidence does not
support this. See Melvyn C. Goldstein and Cynthia M. Beall, “China’s Birth
Control Policy in the Tibet Autonomous Region: Myths and Realities,” Asian
Survey, 31: 3 (March 1991), pp. 285–303.
GENOCIDES OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLES
100
21 See “The Five Point Peace Plan for Tibet, by His Holiness the Dalai Lama,
Washington, DC, 21 September 1987,” http://www.freetibet.org/info/file/file3.
html. The proposals were “further clarified” but “also developed...further” in the
Dalai Lama’s speech to European Parliament representatives in June 1988; for
details, see Shakya, The Dragon in the Land of Snows, p. 423.
The Armenian
Genocide
Sir: I have the honor to report to the Embassy about one of the severest measures ever
taken by a government and one of the greatest tragedies in all history.
American Consul Leslie Davis, writing to Henry Morgenthau,
US Ambassador in Constantinople, June 30, 1915
■
INTRODUCTION
The murder of over a million Armenians in Turkey between 1915 and 1923 presaged
Adolf Hitler’s even more gargantuan assault on European Jews in the 1940s. However,
for decades, the events were almost forgotten. War crimes trials – the first in history
– were held after the Allied occupation of Turkey, but were abandoned in the face
of Turkish resistance. In August 1939, as he prepared to invade western Poland, Hitler
mused to his generals that Mongol leader “Genghis Khan had millions of women
and men killed by his own will and with a gay heart. History sees in him only a great
state builder.” And in noting his instructions to the Death’s Head killing units “to
kill without mercy men, women and children of Polish race or language,” Hitler
uttered some of the most resonant words in the history of genocide: “Who, after all,
talks nowadays of the annihilation of the Armenians?”
1
Fortunately, Hitler’s rhetorical question could not sensibly be asked today – except
in Turkey. Over the past four decades, a growing movement for consciousness-raising,
apology, and restitution has entrenched the Armenian catastrophe as one of the three
“classic” genocides of the twentieth century. It was not the century’s first genocide,
101
CHAPTER 4
as is often alleged. The Congo “rubber terror” (Chapter 2) was ongoing as the century
dawned, and the German destruction of the Herero (Chapter 3) preceded the Turkish
assault on Armenians by over a decade. Yet in its scale, central coordination, and
systematic implementation, the Armenian holocaust may perhaps be considered the
first truly “modern” genocide.
If Hitler’s derisive comment would be out of place today, neither could it have been
made at the time of the Armenian genocide itself. The fate of the “starving
Armenians” in 1915–17 was the subject of outrage and mass mobilization around the
Western world. In the United States, it spawned “the first international human rights
movement in American history,” resuscitated for contemporary audiences by Peter
Balakian. “It seems that no other international human rights issue has ever pre-
occupied the United States for such a duration,” Balakian noted in his account of
the genocide and US response, The Burning Tigris.
2
The term “holocaust,” which most people associate with the Jewish genocide at
Nazi hands, seems to have been used first in a human-rights context to describe
Armenian suffering – by the New York Times in 1895, during a major round of
massacres that preceded the full-scale genocide of 1915–17. Moreover, both US and
German representatives in Turkey – ranging from Ambassador Henry Morgenthau
and his network of consuls, to missionaries and Germans employed on the Berlin–
Baghdad railway – compiled reams of eyewitness testimony and photographic images
that still sear the conscience nearly a century later (see Figures 4.1 and 4.2). In
the outrage felt by these observers, and their multifaceted strategies to spread the
news to the outside world, we see the dawn of the modern age of human-rights
activism.
■
ORIGINS OF THE GENOCIDE
Three key factors shaped the Armenian tragedy: (1) the decline of the Ottoman
Empire, which provoked desperation and humiliation among Turkey’s would-be
revolutionary modernizers, and eventually violent reaction;
3
(2) the vulnerable
position of the Armenians in the Ottoman realm; and (3) the outbreak of the First
World War, history’s most cataclysmic war to that point, which confronted Turkey
with invasion from the west (at Gallipoli) and from the Russians in the northeast.
Armenians are an ancient people, having inhabited the southern Caucasus region
for perhaps 3,000 years. Christianized early in the first millennium, they took pride
in having preserved their faith through centuries of imperial domination, following
the crushing of the independent Armenian state by Muslim Mamluks in 1375. By
the late nineteenth century, they constituted the largest non-Muslim population in
the Anatolian heartland of the Ottoman Empire.
4
In many respects their position
under Ottoman rule may be, and has been, likened to that of European Jews prior
to their emancipation (Chapter 6). Isolated from the mainstream by their religious
beliefs, marginalized politically and economically, both urban Armenians and Jews
nonetheless found niches in the economy and halls of power. Armenian culture, like
its Jewish counterpart, placed great emphasis on learning; accordingly, representatives
of both groups rose to positions of influence in politics and the professions even when
THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE
102
formally disenfranchised. But both groups correspondingly came to be viewed with
envy and distaste by many in the wider society.
5
In the modern era of liberal nation-
alism, both Armenians and Jews secured political and cultural guarantees. In the
Armenian case, though, these were more rhetorical than substantive; and even such
lip-service was too much for the more reactionary Ottoman elements, who eventually
united behind an exclusivist and ultra-nationalist agenda.
In Chapter 10, I argue that humiliation is one of the greatest psychological
spurs to violence, including mass violence and genocide. The final decades of the
Ottoman Empire constituted an almost unbroken string of humiliations for its rulers
and Muslim populations. Indeed, the empire had been in decline since its armies were
repulsed from the gates of Western Europe, at Vienna in 1688. “As well as the loss
of Greece and effectively Egypt, in the first twenty-nine years of the nineteenth
century alone the empire had lost control of Bessarabia, Serbia, Abaza, and Mingrelia.”
In 1878, the empire “cede[d] ownership of or genuine sovereignty over...Bosnia,
Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Kars, Ardahan, and Cyprus,” with “the losses of that year
alone comprising one-third of Ottoman territory and 20 per cent of the empire’s
inhabitants.”
6
In the first few years of the twentieth century, outright collapse loomed. In 1908,
Bulgaria declared full independence, and Crete was also lost. A day later, Austria
annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina. Italy seized Libya in 1912. The following year,
Albania and Macedonia seceded. Summarizing these disasters, Robert Melson noted
that “out of a total area of approximately 1,153,000 square miles and from a
population of about 24 million, by 1911 the Turks had lost about 424,000 square
miles and 5 million people”;
7
and by 1913, only a narrow strip of European territory
remained in their grasp. These multiple blows to Ottoman power and pride have been
well captured by Turkish author Taner Akçam, who writes of
the slow but continuous disintegration of the great empire, the military defeats
in wars that continued over the years, the loss of tens of thousands of people, a
society whose dignity was scorned along with the constant loss of self-worth,
overwhelmed by the imagery of a great history, fantasies about recreating the past,
the terminal bursting of these dreams, and the inability to absorb and integrate
these numerous contradictions.
8
Amidst the disasters, Ottoman rulers were predictably hypersensitive to outside
“interference” in imperial affairs. Such involvement had begun with the imperial
campaign in Ottoman-ruled Bulgaria in 1875–76, when British politician (later
prime minister) William Gladstone had protested atrocities against the (mostly
Christian) Bulgars. The co-religionist theme continued when both Britain and Russia
sought to increase their influence in the Ottoman realm by advocating on behalf
of the empire’s Armenian population.
9
As a result, and fatefully, the Armenians – who
had previously enjoyed the status of “millet” (recognized minority community)
within the empire, despite the discrimination directed against them
10
– came to be
viewed as a subversive population aligned with the Ottomans’ mortal enemies.
Suspicions were heightened by the advent, in the 1870s and 1880s, of a small number
of Armenian revolutionary societies – part of a broader “‘Armenian Renaissance’
THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE
103
(Zartonk) that gained momentum from the middle of the nineteenth century on,”
marked “by the return from European universities of hundreds of Ottoman Armenian
students inspired by romantic and liberal ideas, the use of the vernacular as the
written language, the development of the Armenian press in major cities, and the
establishment of numerous schools in provincial towns and even villages.”
11
These
societies, like the small number of Armenian political parties that mobilized
subsequently, demanded full equality within the empire, and occasionally appealed
to outside powers for protection and support. These actions aroused the hostility of
Muslim nationalist elements, and eventually prompted a violent backlash.
With the Ottomans’ hold over their empire faltering, and Armenian nationalists
newly insurgent, a wave of large-scale massacres swept across Armenian-populated
territories. Between 1894 and 1896, “the map of Armenia in Turkey went up in
flames. From Constantinople to Trebizond to Van to Diyarbekir, and across the whole
central and eastern plain of Anatolia, where historic Armenia was lodged, the killing
and plunder unfolded.”
12
Vahakn Dadrian, the leading historian of the Armenian
genocide, considers the 1894–96 massacres “a test case for the political feasibility, if
not acceptability by the rest of the world, of the enactment by central authorities of
the organized mass murder of a discordant nationality.”
13
The killings were, however,
more selective than would be the case in the 1915–17 conflagration. Among other
things, they displayed a pronounced gendercidal character (see Chapter 13), with
Armenian males of “battle age” overwhelmingly the targets.
14
Children and women
were generally spared outright murder – though many did die, and a great many
women suffered grievously from wanton sexual attacks. As well, central state direction
was more difficult to discern than it would be in 1915–17. According to Donald
Bloxham, the main role was played by “Muslim religious leaders, students, and
brotherhoods,” though many ordinary Muslims, especially Kurds, also participated.
15
Nonetheless, between 80,000 and 200,000 Armenians were killed in the great
pogrom.
16
The killings provoked widespread international opprobrium; Armenian repre-
sentatives petitioned the Ottoman Court for protection and civil guarantees. “The
list of Armenian demands was broad and basic,” according to Balakian. It included
“fair taxation; guarantees of freedom of conscience; the right of public meetings;
equality before the law; protection of life, property, and honor (this meant the
protection of women).”
17
Rhetorical assurances were issued, but the daringly direct
petition increased perceptions of the Armenians as a restive and “uppity” minority.
In 1908, the tottering Ottoman sultanate was overthrown in the Young Turk
revolution, led by a group of modernization-minded military officers. Armenians
joined with many other peoples of the realm in welcoming the transformations. In
the first blush of post-revolutionary enthusiasm, “a wave of fraternal effusions
between Ottoman Christians and Muslims swept the empire.”
18
It seemed there was
a place for all, now that despotism had been overturned. Indeed, Christians (together
with Jews and other religious minorities) were now granted full constitutional
rights.
19
Unfortunately, as is usually the case with revolutionary movements, the new
Ottoman rulers (grouped under the Committee of Union and Progress, CUP) were
split into liberal-democratic and authoritarian factions. The latter was guided by a
THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE
104
“burgeoning ethnic nationalism (still informed by Islam) blended with a late-imperial
paranoid chauvinism”;
20
its leading ideologist was Ziya Gökalp, whose “pan-Turkism
was bound up in grandiose romantic nationalism and a ‘mystical vision of blood and
race.’”
21
Within the CUP, amidst “economic and structural collapse, the vision of a
renewed empire was born – an empire that would unite all Turkic peoples and stretch
from Constantinople to central Asia. This vision, however, excluded non-Muslim
minorities, such as the Armenians.”
22
In January 1913, in the wake of the shattering Balkan defeats of the previous year,
the extremist CUP faction launched a coup against the moderates and took power.
The new ruling triumvirate – Minister of Internal Affairs Talat Pasha; Minister of
War Enver Pasha; and Minister of the Navy Jemal Pasha – quickly established a
de facto dictatorship. Under the rubric of the so-called Special Organization of the
CUP that they directed, this trio would plan and oversee the Armenian genocide, with
the Special Organization’s affiliates in the Anatolia region serving as ground-level
organizers.
23
■
WAR, MASSACRE, AND DEPORTATION
It appears that a campaign of race extermination is in progress under a pretext of reprisal
against rebellion.
Ambassador Morgenthau to the US Secretary of State, July 16, 1915
In Chapter 2, we saw that a situation of all-out war is often integral to the perpetra-
tion of genocide. The slaughter of the Armenians is a paradigmatic example. The
extreme-nationalist ideology of the dominant CUP faction under Talat, Enver, and
Jemal spread nationwide, as Turkey confronted twin emergencies: an Allied invasion
of the Dardanelles peninsula (aimed at forcing a way through the Straits to the
Black Sea and conquering Constantinople), and a mobilization of Russian forces
on the northeast frontier. Ever since, Turkish governments have justified their denial
of the Armenian genocide by reference to the atmosphere of emergency and chaos.
There is no reason to accept these explanations at face value, but also no reason to
discount the war’s role in facilitating the extermination of two-thirds of Ottoman
Armenians.
24
In April 1915, just as the Allies were about to mount their invasion of the
Dardanelles, the Turkish army launched an assault on Armenians in the city of
Van, who were depicted as traitorous supporters of the Russian enemy. In scenes that
have become central to Armenian national identity, the Armenians of Van organized
a desperate resistance that succeeded in fending off the Turkish attack for weeks.
Eventually, the resistance was crushed, but it provided the “excuse” for the infliction
of full-scale holocaust against the Armenians, with the stated justification of removing
a population sympathetic to the Russian army then battling the Ottomans in eastern
Anatolia. As one young Turk, Behaeddin Shakir, wrote to a party delegate early in
April: “It is the duty of all of us to effect on the broadest lines the realization of the
noble project of wiping out of existence the Armenians who have for centuries been
constituting a barrier to the Empire’s progress in civilization.”
25
THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE
105
The genocide was accompanied, and to some extent presaged, by atrocities against
other Christian populations of the empire, particularly Greeks and Assyrians.
A strong case may be made that these campaigns were part-and-parcel of a broader
Turkish genocide against all “indigenous Christians” of the Ottoman realm, as
Talat Pasha described the target group. Historian Donald Bloxham refers to “a general
anti-Christian chauvinism” in which “Christian and Entente nationals were cast
as collective targets.”
26
Thea Halo has also drawn attention to the suffering of Greek
and Assyrian Christians;
27
but only now are these events beginning to attract
meaningful scholarly interest.
The course of the Armenian genocide
On April 24, 1915, in a classic act of “eliticide” in Constantinople and other major
cities, hundreds of Armenian notables were rounded up and imprisoned. The great
majority were subsequently murdered outright, or tortured and worked to death in
isolated locales. (To the present, April 24 is commemorated by Armenians around the
world as “Genocide Memorial Day.”) This was followed by a coordinated assault on
Armenians throughout most of the Armenian-populated zone; a few coastal
populations were spared, but would be targeted later.
The opening phase of the assault consisted of a clear-cut gendercide against
Armenian males. Like the opening eliticide, this was aimed at stripping the Armenian
community of those who might mobilize to defend it. Throughout the Armenian
territories, males of “battle age” not already in the Ottoman Army were conscripted.
In US Ambassador Henry Morgenthau’s imperishable account, the Armenians “were
stripped of all their arms and transformed into workmen,” then worked to death.
In other cases, more direct measures were applied: “it now became almost the general
practice to shoot them in cold blood.”
28
By July 1915, some 200,000 Armenian men
had been exterminated by these methods,
29
reducing the remaining community “to
a condition of near-total helplessness, thus an easy prey for destruction.”
30
The CUP authorities turned next to destroying the remainder of the Armenian
population. A “Temporary Law of Deportation” and “Temporary Law of Confiscation
and Expropriation” were passed by the executive.
31
Surviving Armenians were told
that they were to be transferred to safe havens. However, as Morgenthau wrote, “The
real purpose of the deportation was robbery and destruction; it really represented
a new method of massacre. When the Turkish authorities gave the orders for
these deportations, they were merely giving the death warrant to a whole race; they
understood this well, and, in their conversations with me, they made no particular
attempt to conceal the fact.”
32
Modern bureaucratic structures and communications
technologies, especially the railroad and telegraph, were critical to the enterprise.
The pattern of deportation was consistent throughout the realm, attesting to its
central coordination. Armenian populations were called by town criers to assemble
in a central location, where they were informed that they would shortly be deported
– a day to a week being the time allotted to frantically gather belongings for the
journey, and to sell at bargain-basement prices whatever they could. In scenes remi-
niscent of the Nazi deportation of Jews to concentration camps, local populations
THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE
106
were depressingly eager to exploit Armenians’ misery and dispossession. “The scene
reminded me of vultures swooping down on their prey,” wrote US Consul Leslie
Davis. “It was a veritable Turkish holiday and all the Turks went out in their gala attire
to feast and to make merry over the misfortunes of others. . . . [It was] the oppor-
tunity of a lifetime to get-rich-quick.”
33
Looting and pillaging were accompanied by a concerted campaign to destroy
the Armenian cultural heritage. “Armenian monuments and churches were dyna-
mited, graveyards were plowed under and turned into fields of corn and wheat, and
the Armenian quarters of cities were torn down and used for firewood and scrap, or
occupied and renamed.”
34
Then the Armenian population was led away on foot
– or in some cases dispatched by train to the wastelands of the Deir el-Zor desert in
distant Syria, in conditions which ensured that tens of thousands died en route.
Kurdish tribespeople swooped down to pillage and kill, but the main strike force
mobilized for mass killing was the so-called chétés, bands of violent convicts originally
released from prison to fight against the Russians, and subsequently deployed by the
tens of thousands to exterminate Armenians. As with the Serb paramilitary units
unleashed in the Bosnian war of the 1990s (see Chapter 8), the genocide’s organizers
believed that using such forces “would enable the government to deflect responsibility.
For as the death tolls rose, they could always say that ‘things got out of control,’ and
it was the result of ‘groups of brigands.’”
35
THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE
107
Figure 4.1 A Danish missionary, Maria Jacobsen, took this photo of Armenian men in the city of Harput being led away for
mass murder on the outskirts of town, May 1915.
Source: Courtesy Karekin Dickran’s Danish-Armenian archive collection.
The attacks on the remaining children, women, and elderly of the deportation
caravans gave rise to hellish scenes. Armenians were forced to run a gauntlet of
soldiers, chétés, and marauding Turkish and Kurdish peasants. “The whole course
of the journey became a perpetual struggle with the Moslem inhabitants,” wrote
Morgenthau:
Such as escaped...attacks in the open would find new terrors awaiting them in
the Moslem villages. Here the Turkish roughs would fall upon the women, leaving
them sometimes dead from their experiences or sometimes ravingly insane. . . .
THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE
108
Figure 4.2 Armenian
children and women
suffered horrific atrocities
during the deportations; the
minority that reached refuge
were often on the verge of
death from starvation,
wounds, and exhaustion.
Source: Maria
Jacobsen/Courtesy Karekin
Dickran’s Danish-Armenian
archive collection.
Frequently any one who dropped on the road was bayoneted on the spot. The
Armenians began to die by hundreds from hunger and thirst. Even when they
came to rivers, the gendarmes [guards], merely to torment them, would sometimes
not let them drink.”
36
“In a few days,” according to Morgenthau,
what had been a procession of normal human beings became a stumbling horde
of dust-covered skeletons, ravenously looking for scraps of food, eating any offal
that came their way, crazed by the hideous sights that filled every hour of their
existence, sick with all the diseases that accompany such hardships and priva-
tions, but still prodded on and on by the whips and clubs and bayonets of their
executioners.
37
In thousands of cases, children and women were kidnapped and seized by villagers;
the women were kept as servants and sex-slaves, the children converted to Islam and
raised as “Turks.” One young male survivor described his group being gathered
together in a field while word went out to the local population: “Whoever wants a
woman or child, come and get them.” “Albert said that people came and took
whomever they wanted, comparing the scene to sheep being sold at an auction.”
38
THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE
109
■
BOX 4.1 ONE WOMAN’S STORY: VERGEEN
In 1975, an Armenian-American named Virginia (Vergeen) Meghrouni died at the
age of 73. Before her death, she placed a copy of her memoir of the Armenian
genocide with Mae Derdarian, the daughter of a woman she had met in Syrian exile,
and remained friends with thereafter. Derdarian published Meghrouni’s memoir as
a book, Vergeen: A Survivor of the Armenian Genocide, in 1996.
39
Vergeen grew up in Kayseri, a medium-sized city in central Turkey. Christians – both
Armenians and Greeks – made up one-third of the population. Armenians in the
town experienced restrictions on the use of their language, but nonetheless were
“the town’s leaders in industry, business and cultural activities.” In childhood,
Vergeen lost both her father and a sister, but her father left generous life insurance,
and she and her mother lived comfortably. Vergeen attended a French-run school.
At the age of 8, she was betrothed per tradition to a much older Armenian boy,
Armen, who emigrated to the United States before the outbreak of the First World
War.
When war came, Vergeen’s beloved French teachers were repatriated to France,
now Turkey’s enemy. All the able-bodied Armenian males of Kayseri were drafted
into army labor brigades, “usually without food and in extremely unsanitary
continued
THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE
110
conditions.” With potential defenders of the community out of the way, the
government mounted brutal searches for hidden arms and ammunition in Armenian
homes, executing anyone caught with a weapon. All Armenian schools were closed.
Rumors circulated that the government was planning to deport all Armenians from
Turkey.
The rumours quickly became fact. On June 15, 1915, notices appeared around
Kayseri commanding Armenians to “leave all your belongings. . . . Close your shops
and businesses....You have ten days to comply with this ultimatum.” Vergeen’s
mother briefly considered converting to Islam in order to avoid deportation, but
young Vergeen demanded her mother stay the course and accept expulsion rather
than conversion. “During the following, excruciating months of exile, my insistence
about leaving Kayseri tormented me. Why didn’t I listen to Mama? Why didn’t we
stay with some of the others who pretended to accept Islam?”
Joining the Armenian caravan out of the city, Vergeen found herself “exhilarated at
first by all the excitement.” Her excitement rapidly evaporated. The caravan passed
a refugee camp where “we could see that dysentery was rampant; many of the
young and elderly were stooped or lying outside their tents, moaning in painful
agony. Further on, we saw unattended infants crawling in and out of a tent, their
faces covered with insects . . . screaming for mothers long gone.”
The caravan proceeded, driven on by vicious guards, harassed and attacked by
Turkish and Kurdish civilians. As elsewhere, remaining men had been separated at
the outset and taken away for mass killing. The children, women, and elderly were
all but defenseless in the face of the attacks by guards and civilians, both of whom
numbered rape and slaughter among their genocidal repertoire. “Week after week,
our caravan moved on. . . . Even though I was becoming numb and hardened, I
could not bear looking at the ghastly sights, thinking that could be Mama and me
one day. Decaying corpses were often scattered all over the terrain, some half-eaten
by dogs and wolves, some with gaping stomachs slashed by scavenging soldiers
looking for ingested lira [Turkish money]. The pitiful sounds of the dying and the
stench of those long dead assailed the air for miles.”
They passed through “wretched” Katma in Turkey, then Aleppo in Syria, and finally
arrived in “godforsaken” Ras-al-Ayn, a site that would become synonymous with
Armenian suffering. For a time, though, Ras-al-Ayn seemed a genuine refuge.
Vergeen’s mother had managed to secrete some money that allowed them to buy
adequate food for the first time in weeks. They were fortunate to survive a raging
typhus epidemic that struck the camp in Autumn 1915.
It was too good to last. After four months, Turkish soldiers invaded the camp and
rounded up its remaining inhabitants, apparently for extermination. But a Bedouin
Arab present at the camp had spotted Vergeen. He expressed his wish to take her
For those not abducted, the death marches usually meant extermination, as
was intended. Morgenthau cited one convoy that began with 18,000 people and
arrived at its destination with 150 survivors, all children and women. The state
of the survivors, moreover, was such that they often died within days of reaching
refuge. J.B. Jackson, the US consul in Aleppo, Syria, recounted eyewitness descrip-
tions of:
over 300 women [who] arrived at Ras-el-Ain, at that time the most easterly station
to which the German–Baghdad railway was completed, entirely naked, their hair
flowing in the air like wild beasts, and after travelling six days afoot in the burning
sun. Most of these persons arrived in Aleppo a few days afterwards, and some of
them personally came to the Consulate and exhibited their bodies to me, burned
to the color of a green olive, the skin peeling off in great blotches, and many of
them carrying gashes on the head and wounds on the body as a result of the terrible
beatings inflicted by the Kurds.
41
THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE
111
as a servant in his home. An Armenian woman implored Vergeen to accept the offer
– on the condition that the woman, Vergeen’s mother, and several other Armenians
also accompany her. The deal was struck. Vergeen, renamed Noura, began her life
as a servant in the Bedouin household of Yousuf and his wife Aneche.
40
Her face
was tattooed in the manner of Bedouin women – markings that she would have
surgically removed much later in life.
At first, things seemed tolerable – and then, tragedy struck. Yousuf, irritated by the
extra mouths he had to feed, arranged for the murder of Vergeen’s mother outside
the Bedouin camp. “Days later, I found out the details . . . Oh! MAMA! An explosive
rage surged through my gut...I wanted revenge!...[But] all I could do was
weep.” Further trauma followed. Though he had usually treated her well, Yousuf
still considered Vergeen his property. One day he summoned her away from camp
and raped her, “damn[ing] me...with an indelible stain in the dawn of my life.”
After one failed attempt at escape, Vergeen finally managed to sneak away
from the camp while Yousuf’s wife was in labor. Alighting first at a foreign-run
railroad station, Vergeen passed the rest of the war at a hospital in Aleppo, where
the Syrian authorities had at last been persuaded to grant refugee status to deported
Armenians.
After the war, Vergeen was able to establish contact with Armen, her betrothed
from many years earlier, in the United States. She traveled by train to Port Said, Egypt,
and in November 1920 by British cargo ship to New York. In January 1921, she and
Armen were married. The family eventually moved to southern California, where
Vergeen lived out her days, and wrote her memoirs of the horrors and upheavals
now receding into the past.
By 1917, between half and two-thirds of Ottoman Armenians had been exterminated
in the ways described. But this was not the end. Large-scale massacres continued.
In the final months of the First World War, Turkey crossed the Russian frontier and
occupied sizable parts of Russian Armenia. There, according to historian Vahakn
Dadrian, “the genocidal engine of destruction unleashed by the Young Turk Ittihadists
was once more activated to decimate and destroy the other half of the Armenian
population living beyond the established frontiers of Turkey....According to Soviet
and Armenian sources, in five months of Turkish conquest and occupation about
200,000 Armenians of the region perished.”
42
By this point, the killing was not all
one-sided. “Reciprocally, Armenians attacked civilian populations in Turkish towns
and villages, massacring civilians and doing as much damage as they could. Having
survived genocide, some of the Armenian irregulars were attempting to avenge the
atrocities of 1915.”
43
■
THE AFTERMATH
Turkey’s defeat in the First World War, and the subsequent collapse and occupation
of the Ottoman Empire, offered surviving Armenians an opportunity for national
self-determination. In 1918, an independent Republic of Armenia was declared in
the southwestern portion of Transcaucasia, a historically Armenian territory that had
been under Russian sovereignty since the early nineteenth century. US President
Woodrow Wilson was granted the right to delimit a new Armenian nation, formalized
at the Treaty of Sèvres in 1920. Later that year, Wilson supervised the drawing of
boundaries for independent Armenia that included parts of historic Ottoman
Armenia in eastern Turkey.
Turkey, however, staged a rapid political recovery following its abject military
defeat. The new leader, Mustafa Kemal (known as Ataturk, “father of the Turks”),
quickly renounced the Sèvres Treaty, and declared in a secret communication that
it was “indispensable that Armenia be annihilated politically and physically.”
44
The regime invaded, and quickly reconquered six of the former Ottoman provinces
that had been granted to independent Armenia under Sèvres. What remained of
Armenia was swallowed up by the new Soviet Union. Following a brief period of
cooperation with Armenian nationalists, the Soviets took complete control in 1921,
and Armenia was incorporated into the Transcaucasian Soviet Federated Socialist
Republic (TSFSR) in 1922. A separate Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic was
created in 1936.
In the interim (1918–20) between the Ottoman collapse and the ascendancy of
the nationalist Ataturk regime, and at the insistence of the Allies (who, as early as
1915, with an eye on the postwar dismemberment of the Turkish heartland, had
accused the Young Turk rulers of “crimes against humanity”), the Turkish government
– at British insistence – held a remarkable series of trials of those accused of directing
and implementing the Armenian genocide. In April 1919, the Court pronounced
that “the disaster visiting the Armenians was not a local or isolated event. It was the
result of a premeditated decision taken by a central body...and the immolations
and excesses which took place were based on oral and written orders issued by that
THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE
112
central body.”
45
Over a hundred former government officials were indicted, with most
being transferred to British custody on the island of Malta. A number were convicted,
and Talat, Enver, and a pair of other leadership figures were sentenced to death.
They were not in Allied custody, however, and in the end, only three relatively minor
figures were executed. The nationalist sentiment that spawned Ataturk’s revolution
staunchly opposed the trials – and in the face of that opposition and Allied pandering,
the impetus for justice began to waver. “Correspondingly the sentences grew weaker,
as the court refrained from handing down death sentences, finding most of the
defendants only ‘guilty of robbery, plunder, and self-enrichment at the expense of
the victims.’”
46
Eventually, in a tactic to be duplicated by Serbs in Bosnia-Herzegovina decades
afterwards, Ataturk took dozens of British hostages from among the occupying forces.
For Britain, which had decided some time earlier that the best policy was “cutting
its losses,” this was the final straw.
47
Anxious to secure the release of their hostages,
and more generally to placate the new Turkish regime, the British freed many of the
Turks in its custody. In July 1923, the Allies signed the Treaty of Lausanne with the
Turks, which made no mention of the independent Armenia pledged at Sèvres.
It was an “abject, cowardly and infamous surrender,” in the estimation of British
politician Lloyd George.
48
Denied formal justice, a number of Armenian militants settled on a vigilante
version. All three of the main organizers of the genocide were killed in the postwar
period: Talat Pasha in Berlin in 1921, at the hands of Soghomon Tehlirian, who had
lost most members of his family in the genocide; Enver Pasha while leading an anti-
Bolshevik revolt in Turkestan in 1922 (in an ambush “led by an Armenian Bolshevik
officer”);
49
and Jemal Pasha, by Armenians in Tiflis in 1922.
■
THE DENIAL
In the summer of 2003, I made a pilgrimage to Gallipoli, at the southern end of
Turkey’s Dardanelles peninsula.
50
There, in April 1915, Allied forces staged an inva-
sion aimed at breaking through the Dardanelles Straits, occupying Constantinople,
and knocking Turkey out of the First World War. Over nine months of attacks
launched from the narrow ribbon of beach they occupied, up precipitous cliffs
and through thorny gulleys, the Allies sought fruitlessly to reach the Straits. Fierce
Turkish resistance stopped every thrust. In the end the Allies withdrew, having
suffered tens of thousands of casualties, mostly from disease. Today, their carefully
tended cemeteries dot the landscape, as do those where a similar number of Turkish
casualties are buried.
It is likely that if the Gallipoli campaign had succeeded, the genocide against
the Armenians would not have occurred. But it did – unless, that is, you shared the
views of the author of a guidebook to the battlefields, available at souvenir shops
in Çannakale across the Straits. According to this text, the Armenians were “privileged
subjects of the Ottoman Empire [who] had been disloyal during the war, having
crossed the [Russian] border, joined the Russian Army, and fought against the
Tu r k s ” :
THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE
113
Furthermore, they were hoarding arms for a movement to set up an indepen-
dent Armenian state in Turkey. They had staked their future on the victory of the
Allies and, like the Greeks, gloated over every Turkish reverse in the war. They were
rich, and many of them handled commerce throughout the empire. In effect,
they were a fifth column inside the country....The leaders were punished
with death and the rest put on the road to the south of the empire, to Syria and
Mesopotamia [Iraq], in order to reduce the Armenian population near the Russian
border. This event would later be introduced to the world as the so-called “Turkish
massacre” and be turned into negative propaganda against the modern Republic
of Turkey by the Armenian diaspora.
51
In the author’s mind, the death and destruction inflicted on the Armenians did
not constitute genocide or even “massacre,” but was a necessary and morally justifiable
response to the insidious machinations of Armenian rebels. The “rich,” “gloat[ing]
. . . fifth column” got what was coming to it. In espousing these viewpoints, moreover,
the author was simply reflecting the general Turkish attitude towards the Armenian
events.
This is classic genocide denial, force-fed to an international community by
a sustained Turkish government campaign. As Donald Bloxham summarizes,
Turkey has “written the Armenians out of its history books, and systematically
destroyed Armenian architecture and monuments to erase any physical traces of
an Armenian presence.” Moreover, “Armenian genocide denial is backed by the
full force of a Turkish state machinery that has pumped substantial funding into
public-relations firms and American university endowments to provide a slick and
superficially plausible defence of its position.”
52
In these efforts (analyzed in com-
parative context in Chapter 14), Turkey has been greatly assisted by its close alliance
with the US, its membership in NATO, and its mutually supportive arrangement
with Israel.
53
For the US, Turkey was critically important in the “containment” of
the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Today, it serves as a secular bulwark against
Muslim-fundamentalist ferment in the Middle East. Accordingly, US military leaders,
as well as “security”-minded politicians, have played a key role in denial of the
genocide.
54
The close US–Turkish relationship means that Turkish studies in the
United States is well-funded, not only through Turkish government sources, but
thanks to the large number of contractors (mainly arms manufacturers) who do
business with Turkey.
In recent years, however, the denial efforts of the Turkish government and its
supporters have met with decreasing success. “Today, twenty countries, most of them
in Europe, acknowledge the Armenian Genocide, as do the European Parliament,
the United Nations, and the International Association of Genocide Scholars.”
55
The most prominent national-level action was a 1998 resolution by the French
National Assembly: a single sentence reading, “France recognizes the Armenian
genocide of 1915.”
56
This was passed over strong Turkish objections and threats of
economic reprisals against French companies doing business with Turkey. In April
2004, the Canadian House of Commons voted to recognize “the death of 1.5 million
Armenians between 1915 and 1923 as a genocide . . . and condemn this act as a crime
against humanity.”
57
THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE
114
The United States still held out. After numerous abortive initiatives, the House
of Representatives seemed poised in October 2000 to acknowledge the Armenian
tragedy as genocide, and condemn its perpetrators. However, “minutes before the
House was due to vote” on the measure, “J. Dennis Hastert, the speaker, withdrew
the resolution . . . citing President Clinton’s warnings that a vote could harm national
security and hurt relations with Turkey, a NATO ally.” National Security Council
spokesman P.J. Crowley expressed the relief of many in government: “We applaud the
speaker’s decision. It was the right thing to do for America’s national interests, the
right thing to do for stability in a volatile region, and the right thing to do for both
Turkey and Armenia.”
58
The setback nonetheless seemed likely to be surmounted
eventually. “In time – it will pass,” said Aram Sarafian, a spokesperson for the National
Organization of Republican Armenians. “Every year it gets closer.”
59
Even in Turkey, cracks are beginning to appear in the façade of denial. This was
evident in the brave work of Taner Akçam and other scholars, and relatedly in the
move towards rapprochement with the country’s Kurdish minority. In the 1970s and
1980s, the Kurds had been exposed to ghastly persecutions and violence reminiscent,
at times, of the Armenian genocide. The opening to the Kurds was dictated, in large
part, by Turkey’s desire to join the European Union (EU). As democratization
measures took hold, aimed at smoothing the country’s path into Europe, it seemed
possible that recognition of the holocaust against Armenians would follow. “History,”
declared Turkish writer Sechuk Tezgul, “is waiting for that honest Turkish leader who
will acknowledge his ancestors’ biggest crime ever, who will apologize to the Armenian
people, and who will do his best to indemnify them, materially and morally, in the
eyes of the world.”
60
■
FURTHER STUDY
Taner Akçam, From Empire to Republic: Turkish Nationalism and the Armenian
Genocide. London: Zed Books, 2004. The first book in English by the dissident
Turkish scholar.
Peter Balakian, The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response.
New York: HarperCollins, 2003. The best overview of the genocide and the US
humanitarian response; see also Black Dog of Fate (memoir).
Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the
Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2005. Excellent on the international machinations surrounding the “Armenian
question.”
Vahakn N. Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide: Ethnic Conflict from the
Balkans to Anatolia to the Caucasus. Providence, RI: Berghahn Books, 1995.
Background to the genocide.
Mae Derdarian, Vergeen: A Survivor of the Armenian Genocide. Los Angeles, CA:
Atmus Press Publications, 1998. Survivor’s testimony, sampled in this chapter.
G. S. Graber, Caravans to Oblivion: The Armenian Genocide, 1915. New York: John
Wiley & Sons, 1996. Readable popular account.
Richard G. Hovannisian, ed., The Armenian Genocide in Perspective. New Brunswick,
THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE
115
NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1986. Early collection, still in print and still a lucid
introduction.
Robert Melson, Revolution and Genocide: On the Origins of the Armenian Genocide
and the Holocaust. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Theoretically
rich study.
Donald E. Miller and Lorna Touryan Miller, Survivors: An Oral History of the
Armenian Genocide. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999. Oral
history focusing on the experiences of Armenian children.
Henry Morgenthau, Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story. http://www.cilicia.com/morgen
thau/MorgenTC.htm. Memoirs of the US Ambassador to Constantinople.
Ronald Grigor Suny, Looking Toward Ararat: Armenia in Modern History.
Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1993. Examines the rise of
Armenian nationalism, the genocide, and the subsequent politics of Soviet
Armenia and the diaspora.
The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, 1915–16. http://www.cilicia.
com/bryce/a00tc.htm. Text of the British “Blue Book” (published in 1916) on
atrocities against the Armenians.
■
NOTES
1 In German, “Wer redet heute noch von der Vernichtung der Armenier?” Hitler quoted in
Ronnie S. Landau, The Nazi Holocaust (Chicago, IL: Ivan R. Dee, 1994), p. 15. On the
documentary evidence for Hitler’s statement, see Vahakn N. Dadrian, The History of the
Armenian Genocide: Ethnic Conflict from the Balkans to Anatolia to the Caucasus (6th rev.
edn) (New York: Berghahn Books, 2003), pp. 403–9.
2 Peter Balakian, The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response (New
York: HarperCollins, 2003), p. xiii.
3 Throughout this chapter, for convenience, I refer to “Turkey” and “the Ottoman
Empire” interchangeably.
4 The shrinking of the empire meant that the Ottoman realm became more homogeneous,
and the minority Christians of the realm (the Armenians, Assyrians, and Pontic Greeks)
stood out more prominently. Whereas the Ottoman Empire had once been unusually
diverse, cosmopolitan, and tolerant, its dissolution spurred those who yearned for an
ethnically “pure” Turkish homeland. I am indebted to Benjamin Madley for this point.
5 It should be noted that “only parts of the Armenian population fall into the prosperous
middleman category – much of this is an Ottoman/Turkish stereotype. Probably
80 percent of the Armenian population was rural, much of that number living in the
same grinding poverty as ordinary Kurds and Turks.” Donald Bloxham, personal
communication, August 31, 2005.
6 Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and
the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005),
pp. 30–31.
7 Melson quoted in Donald E. Miller and Lorna Touryan Miller, Survivors: An Oral History
of the Armenian Genocide (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999), p. 47. The
death-toll associated with these upheavals was also immense, though its precise
parameters are unclear. See Justin McCarthy’s revisionist study, Death and Exile: The
Ethnic Cleansing of Ottoman Muslims, 1821–1922 (Princeton, NJ: The Darwin Press,
1995). McCarthy claims that during the period under consideration, “Five and one-half
million Muslims died, some of them killed in wars, others perishing as refugees from
starvation and disease” (p. 1).
THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE
116
8 Taner Akçam, “The Genocide of the Armenians and the Silence of the Turks,” in Levon
Chorbajian and George Shirinian, eds, Studies in Comparative Genocide (New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 1999), p. 137.
9 For an overview of the actions and motivations of the foreign powers, see Bloxham,
The Great Game of Genocide; and Manoug Somakian, Empires in Conflict: Armenia and
the Great Powers, 1895–1920 (London: I.B. Tauris, 1995).
10 Among the discriminatory measures was the so-called “boy collection or devshirme, which
meant that Ottoman officials would take children from their Christian families, convert
them to Islam, and put them to work in the Ottoman military and civil service.” Balakian,
The Burning Tigris, p. 41.
11 Stephan Astourian, “The Armenian Genocide: An Interpretation,” The History Teacher,
23: 2 (February 1990), p. 123.
12 Balakian, The Burning Tigris, p. 59.
13 Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide, p. 151.
14 For more on the gendercidal character of the Armenian holocaust, targeting both men
and women, see Adam Jones/Gendercide Watch, “Case Study: The Armenian
Genocide,” http://www.gendercide.org/case_armenia.html, from which some passages in
this chapter are adapted.
15 Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide, p. 55.
16 For analysis of the death-toll, see Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide,
pp. 153–57.
17 Balakian, The Burning Tigris, p. 58.
18 Astourian, “The Armenian Genocide,” p. 129.
19 In April 1909, another massacre of Armenians occurred in the city of Adana, with similar
killing campaigns occurring “all across Cilicia and around the Gulf of Alexandretta.”
However, “this time the new revolutionary government decided to act and prosecuted 34
Turks and 6 Armenians for their part in the communal strife.” Andrew Bell-Fialkoff,
Ethnic Cleansing (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1999), p. 150.
20 Bloxham, personal communication, August 31, 2005.
21 Balakian, The Burning Tigris, p. 164.
22 Miller and Miller, Survivors, p. 39.
23 For example, Bahaeddin S akir, who headed the Special Organization in the eastern
Ottoman provinces, wrote in February 1915 of the CUP’s decision that “the Armenians
living in Turkey will be destroyed to the last. The government has been given ample
authority. As to the organization of the mass murder, the government will provide the
necessary explanations to the governors, and to the army commanders. The delegates of
[the CUP] in their own regions will be in charge of this task.” Cited in Astourian, “The
Armenian Genocide,” p. 139.
24 In conversations with a top official of the German Embassy in Constantinople, Talat
Pasha, the Ottoman Minister of the Interior, stated (in the official’s summary) that he
“wanted to take advantage of the world war to thoroughly get rid of its internal enemies,
the indigenous Christians.” Cited in Astourian, “The Armenian Genocide,” p. 116.
25 Shakir quoted in Ronald Grigor Suny, Looking Toward Ararat: Armenia in Modern
History (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1993), p. 112.
26 Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide, p. 71.
27 Thea Halo, “The Exclusivity of Suffering: When Tribal Concerns Take Precedence over
Historical Accuracy,” unpublished research paper, 2004 (see also the discussion of
genocide denial in Chapter 14). Bloxham describes the policy adopted towards Ottoman
Greeks from 1913 to 1916 as “a combination of population engineering and economic
appropriation, using boycotts, murders, terrorization, and then deportation” (The Great
Game of Genocide, p. 64). However, he argues that generalized killing of Greeks did not
occur until 1921–22, following the Greek invasion and occupation of large parts of
Turkey; and then it took place in the context of a “war of extermination” featuring
comparably widespread atrocities against civilians by both Greek and Turkish forces. See
Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide, pp. 64, 164.
THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE
117
28 Henry J. Morgenthau, Murder of a Nation, http://www.cilicia.com/morgenthau/Morgen
TC.htm.
29 Michael Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 148.
30 Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide, p. 226.
31 See Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide, pp. 221–22.
32 Morgenthau, Murder of a Nation.
33 Davis quoted in Balakian, The Burning Tigris, p. 234.
34 Norman M. Naimark, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-century Europe
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), p. 41.
35 Balakian, The Burning Tigris, pp. 182–83.
36 Morgenthau, Murder of a Nation.
37 Morgenthau, Murder of a Nation.
38 Miller and Miller, Survivors, p. 110.
39 Mae M. Derdarian, Vergeen: A Survivor of the Armenian Genocide, based on a memoir by
Virginia Meghrouni (Los Angeles, CA: Atmus Press Publications, 1996). The quoted
material in this section is drawn from pp. 26, 33, 38, 41–42, 45–48, 93, and 107.
40 For an overview of this practice, see Ara Sarafian, “The Absorption of Armenian
Women and Children into Muslim Households As a Structural Component of
the Armenian Genocide,” ch. 9 in Omer Bartov and Phyllis Mack, In God’s Name:
Genocide and Religion in the Twentieth Century (New York: Berghahn Books, 2001),
pp. 209–21.
41 Miller and Miller, Survivors, p. 119.
42 Vahakn N. Dadrian, “The Comparative Aspects of the Armenian and Jewish Cases of
Genocide: A Sociohistorical Perspective,” in Alan S. Rosenbaum, ed., Is the Holocaust
Unique? Perspectives on Comparative Genocide (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998),
pp. 127–28.
43 Balakian, The Burning Tigris, p. 320.
44 Cited in Balakian, The Burning Tigris, p. 328. In a precursor to subsequent Turkish
campaigns of genocide denial, Ataturk claimed that the Armenians killed were “victims
of foreign intrigues” and guilty of abusing “the privileges granted them.”
45 Quoted in Gary Jonathan Bass, Stay the Hand of Vengeance: The Politics of War Crimes
Tribunals (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 127.
46 Balakian, The Burning Tigris, p. 341. For more on the trials, see Vahakn Dadrian, “The
Turkish Military Tribunal’s Prosecution of the Authors of the Armenian Genocide,”
Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 11: 1 (spring 1997).
47 Bass, Stay the Hand of Vengeance, p. 136.
48 Lloyd George quoted in Bass, Stay the Hand of Vengeance, p. 144.
49 Balakian, The Burning Tigris, p. 345.
50 See the photo galleries of the (beautiful) battlefield sites at http://adamjones.freeservers.
com/turkey2003.htm. Peter Weir’s film, Gallipoli, is a fair depiction of events from the
viewpoint of Australian soldiers.
51 Mustafa As kin, Gallipoli: A Turning Point (Çanakkale: Mustafa As kin, n.d.),
p. 40.
52 Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide, pp. 211, 228. See also Amy Magaro Rubin,
“Critics Accuse Turkish Government of Manipulating Scholarship,” Chronicle of Higher
Education, October 27, 1995.
53 On the Turkish–Israeli relationship, see Yair Auron, The Banality of Denial: Israel and
the Armenian Genocide (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2003). It should
be stressed that many Jewish scholars in Israel and the US have worked diligently
to acknowledge and explore the Armenian genocide, and its parallels with the Nazi
holocaust against the Jews.
54 The trend began early on. Colby Chester, a retired US admiral, wrote in 1922 in the New
York Times Current History: “The Armenians were moved from the inhospitable regions
where they were not welcome and could not actually prosper but to the most delightful
THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE
118
and fertile parts of Syria...where the climate is as benign as in Florida and California
whither New York millionaires journey each year for health and recreation....And all
this was done at great expense of money and effort.” Quoted in Balakian, The Burning
Tigris, p. 376.
55 Peter Balakian, personal communication, September 11, 2005.
56 “French Parliament Recognises 1915 Armenian Genocide,” Reuters dispatch, May 29,
1998. However, “the wording of the resolution was deliberately designed to remove any
suggestion of the responsibility of the modern Turkish state for the genocide; indeed no
perpetrator agency of any sort was recalled in the brief statement of recognition.”
Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide, p. 224.
57 “Turkey Denounces Armenian Genocide Vote in Commons,” CBC News, April 22,
2004, http://www.cbc.ca/stories/print/2004/04/22/turkeyreaxn040422.
58 Eric Schmitt, “House Backs Off on Turkish Condemnation,” New York Times, October
20, 2000.
59 Marinka Peschmann, “A Position John Kerry Has Held for 20 Years,” Canada Free Press,
September 17, 2004.
60 Tezgul quoted in Balakian, The Burning Tigris, p. 391.
THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE
119
BOX 4A THE ANFAL CAMPAIGN AGAINST IRAQI KURDS, 1988
Twenty to twenty-five million Kurds are spread across Iran, Iraq, Turkey, and
Syria, constituting by most estimates the world’s largest nation without a state
of its own. In March 1987, Saddam Hussein’s cousin from his hometown of
Tikrit, Ali Hassan al-Majid, was appointed Secretary-General of the ruling
Ba’ath Party’s Northern Region. This included Iraqi Kurdistan, a Kurdish-
dominated area that had long chafed under Ba’athist rule.
In the wake of the First World War, with US President Woodrow Wilson’s
call for national self-determination still resounding, Kurds were promised a
homeland of their own – Kurdistan. However, the victorious Allies backed away
from this pledge, made in the Treaty of Sèvres (1920). In an attempt to court
the new Turkish regime of Kemal Ataturk, and fearful of destabilizing Iraq and
Syria (then under British and French mandates, respectively), the Allies reneged
on their commitment to Kurdish independence. The Kurds instead were divided
among Turkey, Iraq, and Syria. The ascent to power of Saddam Hussein in 1968
(he became president in 1979) at first seemed to augur well for the Kurds; an
autonomy agreement was reached in 1970. But it rapidly broke down, and in
March 1974 the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) rose up against the central
regime, sparking a full-scale war the following year and the flight of 130,000
Kurds to Iran.
In 1980, war erupted between Iraq and neighboring Iran. The Kurds were
now viewed as a “fifth column,” draining military resources from the struggle
with Iran. Once Iraq and Iran had reached a ceasefire, the full venom of the
Iraqi regime – judged by the scholar and activist Noam Chomsky to be “perhaps
the most violent and repressive . . . in the world”
1
– could be directed against
the Kurds. Al-Majid, whose genocidal exploits with poison gas would earn him
THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE
120
the moniker “Chemical Ali” in the West, was Saddam Hussein’s chosen agent
for solving the “Kurdish problem.”
By the time the Anfal Campaign was unleashed in 1988,* the Kurds had
already suffered grievously at Iraqi hands. The most notable instance was one
of the largest gendercidal massacres of modern times (for more on gendercide,
see Chapter 13). A particularly restive Kurdish clan was the Barzani; its members
had been forcibly relocated south to desert wastes, where they lived under the
watchful eyes and ready guns of Iraqi security forces. The onset of the Iran–Iraq
war in 1980 heightened the sense of threat among the Ba’ath leadership.
Although the displaced populations were not involved in subversive activities,
two of the clan leader’s sons were leading guerrilla forces in the north. That was
enough. All 8,000 men among the displaced Barzanis were rounded up and
transported to southern Iraq, where they disappeared. Saddam Hussein left little
doubt about what had happened to them: “They betrayed the country and they
betrayed the covenant, and we meted out a stern punishment to them, and they
went to hell.”
2
In February–March 1988, the regime moved to full-fledged genocide against
Iraqi Kurds, featuring an offensive that stunned the world. On March 16, an
aerial attack with chemical weapons was launched on the Kurdish town of
Halabji, near the Iranian border. Thousands of civilians died from bombard-
ments with mustard gas and sarin, a nerve agent. After the raid, journalists and
photographers reached the scene from Iranian territory; photographs and video
footage of Kurdish corpses were flashed around the world. It was not enough
to arouse sustained international opposition, however. Governments, both
Western and non-Western, were too committed to the Iraqi side in the Iran–Iraq
war, too covetous of Iraqi oil, and too anxious to sell Iraq weapons and chemical
ingredients, to care much about the fate of a dispossessed minority.
3
The Anfal campaign consisted of eight distinct operations lasting until
September 1988. Throughout this period, the standard Iraqi strategy was
to attack Kurdish settlements with artillery and airstrikes, conduct mass killings
on the spot, and cart off the remainder of the population for “processing” further
south. Hundreds of thousands of Kurds were trucked to concentration
camps, most notoriously the Topzawa camp near the northern Iraqi city of
Kirkuk. There, the standard gendercidal selection procedure was implemented,
with adult and teenage males separated for execution. The operations of the
killers were “uncannily reminiscent of...the activities of the Einsatzkom-
mandos, or mobile killing units, in the Nazi-occupied lands of Eastern Europe”
(Chapter 6):
* The name chosen for the campaign, Anfal (“the spoils”), referred to the eighth sura of the Qur’an, which pledges to
“cast into the unbelievers’ hearts terror...smite above the necks, and smite every finger of them,” delivering “the
chastisement of the Fire.”
THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE
121
Some groups of prisoners were lined up, shot from the front, and dragged
into predug mass graves; others were made to lie down in pairs, sardine-style,
next to mounds of fresh corpses, before being killed; still others were tied
together, made to stand on the lip of the pit, and shot in the back so that
they would fall forward into it – a method that was presumably more efficient
from the point of view of the killers. Bulldozers then pushed earth or sand
loosely over the heaps of corpses. Some of the grave sites contained dozens
of separate pits and obviously contained the bodies of thousands of victims.
4
Children, women, and the elderly were also swept up in the mass executions,
killed in bombardments and gassings, or selectively targeted after the “battle-
age” males had been destroyed. Others perished from starvation or disease in the
concentration camps. While gendercidal slaughter was ubiquitous and sys-
tematic,
5
the targeting of the wider Kurdish population was “subject to extreme
regional variations,” with the majority of indiscriminate murder occurring in
“two distinct ‘clusters’ that were affected by the third and fourth Anfals [i.e.,
stages of the campaign].” The area targeted most systematically for root-and-
branch genocide appears to have been southern Germian, which abutted the
Arab heartland of Iraq and was targeted during the third Anfal (April 7–20,
1988). The region was considered a hotbed of rebels from the Patriotic Union
of Kurdistan (PUK), the Kurdish group that was the principal military target
of the Anfal campaign. While “males aged fifteen to fifty routinely vanished from
all parts of Germian,” in this southern region “the disappeared include[d]
significant numbers of women and children.” Mass executions involving “an
estimated two thousand women and children” took place at a site on Hamrion
Mountain, between the cities of Tikrit and Kirkuk.
6
Although the mass killing
phase had concluded by the end of 1988, large areas of Kurdish territory were
left devastated and either totally depopulated or stripped of their men.
7
At the end of the 1991 Gulf War, Kurdish aspirations for autonomy were
finally realized. When Kurds rose up in renewed rebellion, Hussein – a ceasefire
with Allied forces freshly signed – turned his army against them. Hundreds of
thousands fled to Iran and Turkey, prompting the Allies to create a safe area and
no-fly zone. This provided the Kurds with a territorial autonomy that has lasted,
in effect, until the present.
As a result of the uprising, Kurdish forces seized some four million documents
from Iraqi archives in the country’s northern regions, and transported them to
safe areas. The documents became the foundation of Human Rights Watch’s
investigation of Anfal. Examination of the documents left little doubt in the
investigators’ minds that Iraq had committed genocide against the Kurds:
“concerning the crucial 1987–1989 period . . . the evidence is sufficiently strong
to prove a case of genocidal intent on the part of the Iraqi Government.” About
100,000 Kurds – Kurdish estimates range up to 180,000 – perished in Anfal,
“systematically put to death in large numbers by order of the central Iraqi
government.”
8
THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE
122
In December 2003, nine months after their controversial invasion of Iraq,
US forces discovered a dishevelled Saddam Hussein on a farm along the Tigris
River. At the time of writing (September 2005), the interim Iraqi government
was preparing to place Hussein and a number of other Ba’ath leaders, including
Ali Hassan al-Majid, on trial for genocide and crimes against humanity.
Reflecting US opposition to the International Criminal Court (ICC – see
Chapter 15), the accused would not face an international tribunal, leading many
to wonder whether the proceedings would be merely a kangaroo court.
Nonetheless, there was at last the possibility that justice would be administered
to Hussein and his henchmen for their many crimes, including the genocidal
rampage against Iraqi Kurds.
■
FURTHER STUDY
Human Rights Watch-Middle East, Iraq’s Crime of Genocide: The Anfal
Campaign Against the Kurds. New Haven, CT: Human Rights Watch/Yale
University Press, 1995. The most intensive investigation of the Anfal events;
see also The Anfal Campaign in Iraqi Kurdistan: The Destruction of Koreme.
Kanan Makiya, Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1998. A good overview of the terroristic
Saddam Hussein regime; see also Cruelty and Silence.
Jonathan C. Randal, After Such Knowledge, What Forgiveness? My Encounters
with Kurdistan. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999. Taut journalistic
account of Iraq’s war against the Kurds, with detailed attention to the
historical context.
■
NOTES
1 Chomsky quoted in Kanan Makiya, Cruelty and Silence: War, Tyranny, Uprising,
and the Arab World (New York: W.W. Norton, 1994), p. 273.
2 See Martin van Bruinessen, “Genocide in Kurdistan?,” in George J. Andreopoulos,
ed., Genocide: Conceptual and Historical Dimensions (Pittsburgh, PA: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1994), pp. 156–57.
3 As indicated, this followed an extended pattern of undermining and betrayal of
Kurdish aspirations by the “international community.” A solid overview of the
machinations surrounding the Kurds in the 1970s is given by Jonathan C. Randal,
After Such Knowledge, What Forgiveness? (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999). Of
the US and Western attitude during Anfal, Samantha Power writes: “US policy-
makers and Western journalists treated Iraqi violence [during Anfal] as if it were
an understandable attempt to suppress rebellion or a grisly consequence of the
Iran–Iraq war. Since the United States had chosen to back Iraq in that war, it
refrained from protest, denied it had conclusive proof of Iraqi chemical weapons
use, and insisted that Saddam Hussein would eventually come around....The
Washington establishment deemed Hussein’s broader campaign of destruction, like
THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE
123
Pol Pot’s a decade before and Turkey’s back in 1915, an ‘internal affair.’” Power,
“A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide (New York: Basic Books,
2002), pp. 171–72.
4 Human Rights Watch-Middle East (hereafter, HRW-ME), Iraq’s Crime of
Genocide: The Anfal Campaign Against the Kurds (New Haven, CT: Human Rights
Watch/Yale University Press, 1995), p. 12.
5 For a more detailed analysis of the gendercidal aspects of the slaughter, and the
visible evidence of it following the campaign, see Adam Jones/Gendercide Watch,
“Case Study: The Anfal Campaign (Iraqi Kurdistan), 1988,” http://www.gender
cide.org/case_anfal.html, from which this boxed text is adapted.
6 See HRW-ME, Iraq’s Crime of Genocide, pp. 13, 96, 115, 171. One small boy,
Taimour Abdullah Ahmad, witnessed and survived a massacre of children and
women; his story received wide international attention. See “An Interview with the
Anfal Survivor, Taimour,” http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~irdp/taimour.html.
7 For a vivid description of the “almost total economic stagnation,” “deserted”
factories, and “villages...populated by only women and children” in the Kurdish
zone, see Jeffrey Pilkington, “Beyond Humanitarian Relief: Economic Development
Efforts in Northern Iraq,” Forced Migration Review, http://www.fmreview.org/
rpn236.htm.
8 HRW-ME, Iraq’s Crime of Genocide, pp. xvii, x.
Stalin’s Terror
Enemies are not people. We’re allowed to do what we like with them. People indeed!
Soviet secret police interrogator to Eugenia Ginzburg, in Journey into the
Whirlwind
“No other state in history,” writes genocide scholar Richard Rubenstein, “has
ever initiated policies designed to eliminate so many of its own citizens as has the
Soviet Union.”
1
The judgment must be moderated both in relative and absolute
terms: the proportion of the Cambodian population killed as a direct result of Khmer
Rouge policies (Chapter 7) approached one-quarter, while in absolute terms Mao
Zedong has been accused of inflicting a death-toll, mostly through famine, that
may have dwarfed even the Soviet Union’s. Nonetheless, there is very little in the
record of human experience to match the violence unleashed between 1917,
when the Bolsheviks took power, and 1953, when Joseph Stalin died and the Soviet
Union moved to adopt a more restrained and largely non-murderous domestic
policy.
The Soviet “Gulag” system has become synonymous with Soviet repression.
The Gulag (an acronym) was a “vast network of labour camps . . . scattered across
the length and breadth of the Soviet Union, from the islands of the White Sea to the
shores of the Black Sea, from the Arctic Circle to the plains of central Asia, from
Murmansk to Vorkuta to Kazakhstan, from central Moscow to the Leningrad [St.
Petersburg] suburbs.”
2
However, emphasis on the Gulag tends to detract from the
other means of Soviet genocide: the “terror-famine” imposed on Ukraine and other
124
CHAPTER 5
regions; the mass executions; the deportations to isolated and barren regions that
condemned numerous exile groups to starvation and death by exposure, if they did
not perish during the deportations themselves.
Likewise, overemphasis on the figure of Stalin may lead the analyst to understate
the role of the legions of satraps who did Stalin’s bidding, as well as the precedent
for Stalin’s “maelstrom of murder”
3
in the system of terror that his predecessor,
Vladimir Lenin, imposed. This chapter will attempt to do justice to these diverse
themes and factors.
■
THE BOLSHEVIKS SEIZE POWER
The Bolshevik Revolution took place against a backdrop of centuries of dictatorship
and underdevelopment in Russia, as well as the most destructive war up until that
point in European history (see Chapter 2). By 1917, Russian armies facing German
and Austro-Hungarian forces had been pushed to the brink of collapse, and the
Russian population confronted famine. Bread riots broke out in the capital, Petrograd
(St. Petersburg). In the face of growing popular and elite opposition, Tsar Nicholas
II abdicated, turning over power to a liberal-dominated provisional government
under Alexander Kerensky. Fatefully, Kerensky’s regime chose to continue the war.
Russian forces crumbled in a poorly conceived military offensive. Hundreds of
thousands of soldiers deserted. Across Russia’s fertile regions, spontaneous seizures
of land added to the chaos.
Poised to exploit the turmoil was Lenin’s Bolshevik party. Lenin was a Russian of
noble birth who had discovered Marxist socialism and agitated from exile for the
overthrow of the tsarist regime. Spirited back to Russia on a sealed train by the
German government, which saw Lenin (presciently) as a means of removing Russia
from the war, Lenin and the Bolsheviks found themselves in a minority position
vis-à-vis the leading socialist faction, the Mensheviks. Lenin improved Bolshevik
fortunes with the promise of “Bread, Peace, Land.” But the party was still a marginal
force, almost non-existent outside the major cities, when Lenin made the decision
to launch a coup against the weakened Kerensky regime.
After storming the Winter Palace in Petrograd and seizing key infrastructure, the
Bolsheviks found themselves in power – but with many predicting that their regime
would last only weeks or months. To bolster their position and popular base, they
quickly sued for peace with Germany and, in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (March
1918), gave up some of Russia’s most fertile, resource-rich territories.
“There can be no revolution without counterrevolution,” writes historian Arno
Mayer.
4
A potent counterrevolution now confronted the new “Soviet Union” (the
“soviets” were workers’ councils taken over by the Bolsheviks as a means of controlling
Russia’s working classes). “White” political forces sought to overthrow the Bolshevik
“Reds.” Russia’s former allies, notably Britain and the United States, were furious at
Lenin’s retreat from the First World War, and terrified at the prospect of socialist
revolution spreading across Europe. With funding, arms, and tens of thousands of
troops on the ground, they backed the Whites in a three-year struggle to the death
with the Bolshevik regime.
STALIN’S TERROR
125
This civil war, one of the most destructive of the twentieth century, lasted
until 1921 and claimed an estimated nine million lives on all sides. Its “influence
. . . on the whole course of subsequent history, and on Stalinism, cannot possibly
be overestimated. It was in the civil war that Stalin and men like Stalin emerged
as leaders, while others became accustomed to harshness, cruelty, terror.”
5
Red forces
imposed “War Communism,” an economic policy that repealed peasants’ land
seizures, forcibly stripped the countryside of grain to feed city dwellers, and sup-
pressed private commerce. All who opposed these policies were “enemies of the
people.” “This is the hour of truth,” Lenin wrote in a letter to a comrade in mid-1918.
“It is of supreme importance that we encourage and make use of the energy of mass
terror directed against the counterrevolutionaries.”
6
The Cheka, the first incarnation
of the Soviet secret police (later the NKVD and finally the KGB), responded with
gusto. Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders may have viewed mass terror as a short-
term measure;
7
but its widespread use belies claims that it was Stalin’s invention.
The civil war left the Reds victorious but the Soviet Union shattered. Famine had
struck large areas of the country, and millions in rural areas were being kept alive
only through foreign, especially US, generosity.
8
Acknowledging reality – a capacity
not yet extinguished among Bolsheviks – Lenin repealed the War Communism
measures. He allowed peasants to return to the land, and instituted the so-called New
Economic Policy (NEP). Under the NEP, market mechanisms were revived, and the
economy was regenerated.
Weakened by an assassination attempt and a series of strokes, Lenin died in 1924,
leaving the field open for an up-and-coming Bolshevik leader to launch his drive for
absolute power.
Joseph Stalin was born Joseph Dzhugashvili in Gori, Georgia, in 1879. His
Caucasian background, his abusive upbringing, and the years he spent in Russian
Orthodox seminaries have all been linked to his personality and subsequent policies:
“There has been too much cod-psychology about Stalin’s childhood,” cautions Simon
Sebag Montefiore in his biography of Stalin, “but this much is certain: raised in a poor
priest-ridden household, he was damaged by violence, insecurity and suspicion but
inspired by the local traditions of religious dogmatism, blood-feuding and romantic
brigandry.”
9
In the pre-revolutionary period, the brigand led a series of daring bank robberies
that brought him to the attention of high officials. It was at this time that
Dzhugashvili adopted his party moniker, Stalin, meaning “Man of Steel.” Captured
by the tsarist authorities, he endured two spells of exile in Siberia.
After the Bolsheviks seized power, Stalin was appointed General Secretary of
the Communist Party in 1922. In itself, the post was an undistinguished admin-
istrative one. But Stalin used it to build a power base and establish control over
the party bureaucracy, while also earning a reputation as “a dynamic leader who
had a hand in nearly all the principal discussions on politics, military strategy,
economics, security and international relations.”
10
When Lenin died in 1924, a
struggle for supremacy pitted Stalin against his nemesis, Leon Trotsky, and a host of
lesser party figures. Stalin’s victory was slow and hard-won, but by 1927 he and his
allies had succeeded in expelling Trotsky from the party and, in 1929, from the
country.
11
STALIN’S TERROR
126
By 1928, Stalin was entrenched as supreme Soviet leader. With world revolution
seemingly a distant prospect, Stalin chose the course of “socialism in one country,”
which for him meant “a new programme of extremely – almost hysterically – rapid
industrialization.”
12
In this decision lay the seeds of two principal genocidal policies
under Stalin: the massive expansion of the Gulag system, which killed millions; and
the campaign against the peasantry, whose grain was needed to feed cities swelled by
the crash industrialization.
The two strategies intersected. By fomenting a spurious “class war” in the coun-
tryside, Stalin could expropriate the holdings of the wealthier (or less poor) peasants;
conscript millions of them into forced labor on industrial projects; and also use the
new bounty of prisoners to extract natural resources (especially gold and timber) that
could be sold abroad for the hard currency needed to purchase industrial machinery
and pay foreign advisors.
■
COLLECTIVIZATION AND FAMINE
Whatever the rhetoric of their claims to represent the working people of the land
and the factories, the Soviet attitude towards the peasants was one of thinly disguised
contempt. “On the one hand they were the People incarnate, the soul of the country,
suffering, patient, the hope of the future,” writes Robert Conquest, a leading historian
of the Stalinist era. “On the other, they appeared as the ‘dark people,’ backward,
mulish, deaf to argument, an oafish impediment to all progress.”
13
Of this group, it was the so-called “kulaks” who aroused the greatest Bolshevik
hatred. The definition of “kulak” was subject to terrifyingly random variations, but
in general the kulaks were better-off peasants, perhaps only slightly better-off.
Owning a cow or hiring a helper could be enough to label one as a kulak, with
consequences that were often fatal, even in the earliest phase of Bolshevik rule.
“Merciless mass terror against the kulaks. . . . Death to them!” pronounced Lenin,
before death took him as well.
14
Stalin, as was his habit, carried things to extremes. In January 1930, his regime
“chillingly approved the liquidation of kulaks as a class.”
15
Over the next two years,
the Soviet dictatorship forced millions onto collective (state-controlled) farms.
16
Resisters and “class enemies,” mostly male heads of family, were shot by the tens of
thousands. Hundreds of thousands more, perhaps over a million, were sent to concen-
tration camps, often under conditions that killed them before they arrived. Official
statistics show the camp system swelling from 212,000 inmates in 1931 to more
than 500,000 in 1934 and nearly a million by 1935.
17
Nearly two million other
“kulaks” were sent into internal exile, either to distant corners of the Soviet Union
or to marginal lands closer to home.
18
After the “kulaks” were destroyed or banished, the regime’s agents scoured the
newly collectivized countryside for grain to feed the cities. Often the tax imposed
on peasants exceeded the total amount that could be harvested. The inexorable
result was widespread famine, not only in Ukraine, but in the Volga region,
Kazakhstan, and other territories afflicted by the twin evils of forced collectivization
and grain seizures. Stalin and his associates cared little. If famine was the price
STALIN’S TERROR
127
of collectivization, it was the price of progress. Countless people would die, but to
utilitarian ends: the Soviet Union would “develop,” and buttress itself against a hostile
world.
In addition, wreaking havoc on Ukraine had the effect of weakening Ukrainian
nationalist aspirations for a generation, perhaps permanently. Whether Stalin
deliberately inflicted the famine as a means to this end is debatable.
19
Regardless,
and predominantly as the result of Stalin’s strategy of collectivization through mass
terror, “a veritable crescendo of terror by hunger” descended on Ukraine, along with
the Caucasus and Soviet Central Asia.
20
“A former activist” in Ukraine described the
consequences:
The most terrifying sights were the little children with skeleton limbs dangling
from balloon-like abdomens. Starvation had wiped every trace of youth from their
faces, turning them into tortured gargoyles; only in their eyes still lingered the
reminder of childhood. Everywhere we found men and women lying prone, their
faces and bellies bloated, their eyes utterly expressionless.
21
A recent and credible estimate of excess deaths in the famine, across all regions of
the USSR from 1930 to 1933, is 5.7 million
22
– approximately the number of
European Jews killed by the Nazis, including those murdered indirectly by starvation
and disease.
■
THE GULAG
As noted, hundreds of thousands of the “kulaks” deported during the collectivization
drive landed in the Gulag system. They toiled in a “system of unofficial slavery,”
23
overworked and malnourished, on industrial projects and infrastructure, though
much of their labor was diverted to hare-brained schemes such as the White Sea
Canal, which claimed thousands of lives but fell into near-disuse after its comple-
tion.
24
Far from atypical was the fate of “scores of thousands of prisoners, almost
entirely peasants . . . thrown ashore at Magadan [in Siberia] in an ill-considered crash
programme to exploit the newly discovered gold seams in the area.” Robert Conquest
wrote that “whole camps perished to a man, even including guards and guard dogs”;
“not more than one in fifty of the prisoners, if that, survived” their first year of
incarceration in such conditions.
25
It was these Siberian camps, devoted either to gold-mining or timber harvesting,
that inflicted the greatest toll throughout the Gulag’s existence. Such camps “can only
be described as extermination centres,” according to Leo Kuper.
26
The camp network
that came to symbolize the horrors of the Gulag was that of the Kolyma gold-fields,
where “outside work for prisoners was compulsory until the temperature reached
–50C and the death rate among miners in the goldfields was estimated at about
30 per cent per annum.”
27
Apart from death by starvation, disease, accidents, and
overwork, NKVD execution squads pronounced death sentences on a whim. In
just one camp, Serpantinka, “more prisoners were executed...in the one year 1938,
than the total executions throughout the Russian Empire for the whole of the last
STALIN’S TERROR
128
century of Tsarist rule.”
28
The number of victims claimed by the Kolyma camps
alone was between a quarter of a million and over one million; in the lightly popu-
lated region today, “skeletons in frozen, shallow mass graves far outnumber the
living.”
29
Other names engraved on Russians’ historical memory include Norilsk, “the
centre of a group of camps more deadly than Kolyma”; and Vorkuta, with a regime
characterized by “extravagant cold,” “exhaustion,” and a “starvation diet” reminiscent
of the Nazi camps.
30
Were the imprisoned multitudes in the Soviet Union meant to die? Can we, in
other words, speak of genocidal intent? The answer may vary according to
geographical location and historical-political context. The deaths in the northern
camps of the Arctic Circle appear to have exhibited a high degree of intentionality.
The predominantly peasant and political prisoners were regularly depicted as
subhuman or (in the case of “politicals”) as the most dangerous of enemies. At best,
they were viewed as expendable fodder for the mines and quarries and frozen forests.
Since the most dangerous conditions imaginable were inflicted, tolerated, and
perpetuated; since life expectancy in the camps was often measured in weeks and
months; and since almost no measures were proposed or implemented to preserve
prisoners alive, their fate seems no less genocidal than that of the American Indians
worked and starved to death in the Spanish silver-mines (Chapter 3).
However, unlike the Spanish mines or the Nazi death camps, conditions varied
substantially across the vast Gulag system (apart from the worst of the war years, when
privation reigned not only in the camps, but across the USSR). Outside the Arctic
camps, work regimes were less harsh and death rates far lower. Here, indeed – and
even in Siberia after the years of true holocaust, 1938–39 – high mortality rates
could be viewed as impeding socialist production. While work regimes in the
Nazi death camps were simply intended to inflict mass murder, the function of the
Soviet camps was primarily economic and political. Camp commanders who
impeded these functions by imposing an overly destructive regime could be
sanctioned, even dismissed. Finally, at no point did the Soviets institute a “selection”
process analogous to the Nazi ritual of dispatching older or weaker prisoners (along
with children and pregnant women) for immediate slaughter. In fact, Soviet practice
differed sharply.
31
■
THE GREAT PURGE OF 1937–38
I am shot! – lightly clad. They judged me;
The dull, featureless gun barrels carried out the sentence.
Anatoly Potyekin
In 1934, the “kulaks” – at least, those who had survived incarceration in the Gulag
– were joined by new waves of enemies of the people: the “terrorists,” “saboteurs,” and
“provocateurs” arrested by the hundreds of thousands after the assassination
of Leningrad party chief Sergei Kirov. The Kirov murder “laid the foundation
for a random terror without even the pretence of a rule of law.”
32
Stalin used it
as a launching pad for the great purge of 1937–38, in which 1,575,000 people
STALIN’S TERROR
129
were arrested, 1,345,000 sentenced, and over 681,000 executed (“more than
85 percent of all the death sentences handed down during the entire Stalinist
period”).
33
It is the purge of the Communist Party that many view as the zenith of Stalinist
terror. (Stalin’s “one true novelty,” according to Martin Amis, “was the discovery of
another stratum of society in need of purgation: Bolsheviks.”)
34
However, as the
Gulag’s chronicler, Anne Applebaum, points out, this is misleading. Millions had
already died – in famines, while undergoing deportation, in exile, and in camps
– before Stalin turned against the “Old Bolsheviks” and their alleged legions of
co-conspirators. Moreover, the apex of the Gulag was actually much later, following
the Second World War.
However, the purge does display better than any other event the ruthless
megalomania and intense paranoia of the dictator. In brief, “those without blind
faith were to die,”
35
and eventually hundreds of thousands of the blindly faithful
were obliterated as well. The campaign began with incremental moves against
the “Right opposition,” led by Nikolai Bukharin, which had questioned the crash-
collectivization and crash-industrialization campaigns, and was now calling for a
return to the New Economic Policy and reconciliation with the shattered peasantry.
The opposition was targeted in three separate “show trials” between 1936 and 1938,
in which Bukharin and other leaders were accused of conspiring with Trotskyite
and foreign elements to sabotage communism in the Soviet Union. The evidence
presented was almost non-existent, convictions relying on absurd confessions
extracted through torture, threats against family members, and (bizarrely) appeals
to revolutionary solidarity.
36
The old guard was convicted en bloc, and usually sentenced to execution. But
the net was cast far and wide. Everyone who confessed named names (and more
names, and still more names). Investigations and arrests snowballed. Meanwhile,
the prevailing paranoia meant that sabotage lurked around every corner, in every
seemingly innocuous situation. According to Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn,
“any adult inhabitant of this country, from a collective farmer up to a member of
the Politburo, always knew that it would take only one careless word or gesture
and he would fly off irrevocably into the abyss.”
37
“Most of us didn’t live in any real
sense,” wrote Nadezhda Mandelstam in her autobiography Hope Against Hope, “but
existed from day to day, waiting anxiously for something until the time came to die.
...In the years of the terror, there was not a home in the country where people did
not sit trembling at night, their ears straining to catch the murmur of passing cars
or the sound of the elevator.”
38
Like careerists and génocidaires everywhere, NKVD officials and others in
“the exterminating profession” were anxious to match, and if possible exceed, the
expectations of those in command. If “enemies of the people” could not be found
in sufficient numbers, individuals – overwhelmingly adult men – were simply
rounded up, shot outright, or charged under Article 58 and shipped off to the
camps.
39
The Great Purge ended only when it became clear that “at the rate arrests were
going, practically all the urban population would have been implicated within a few
months.”
40
As usual, Stalin’s underlings took the fall. The NKVD was purged, and
STALIN’S TERROR
130
its leader, Nikolai Yezhov, arrested and executed.
41
Stalin went on to preside over the
eighteenth Party Congress in March 1939, proclaiming the great accomplishments
of the purge. Only thirty-five of the nearly 2,000 delegates who had attended the
previous Party Congress were still around to celebrate with him.
42
■
THE WAR YEARS
The Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939, following the signing of a non-aggression pact
with Nazi Germany, brought with it mass atrocities that are still relatively little
known. The exception is the murder, on Stalin’s orders, of 20,000 Polish officers who
were then buried in the Katyn forest.
43
Although horrific, this was only a small part
of a wider campaign against the Polish nation. Apart from the officer class of the
military, the campaign concentrated on the destruction of political leaders, members
of the professional and intellectual classes, and businesspeople. The war against the
Ukrainian people was thus duplicated in Poland and, subsequently, in the Baltic
states, which the Soviets invaded and occupied in 1940.
The “eliticidal” character of the campaign is conveyed by a list of those offi-
cially designated for arrest and deportation from Lithuania. According to Anne
Applebaum, the targets included members of “political parties; former members of
the police or the prison service; important capitalists and bourgeoisie; former officers
of the national armies; family members of all of the above; anyone repatriated from
Germany; refugees from ‘former Poland’; as well as thieves and prostitutes.” However,
this was not sufficient for one Soviet commissar, who added (in his words):
“Esperantists [those speaking the ‘universal language’ of Esperanto]; philatelists; those
working with the Red Cross; refugees; smugglers; those expelled from the Communist
Party; priests and active members of religious congregations; the nobility, landowners,
wealthy merchants, bankers, industrialists, hotel and restaurant owners.”
44
STALIN’S TERROR
131
■
BOX 5.1 ONE MAN’S STORY: JANUSZ BARDACH
One of the millions of foreign victims of Stalinist terror was Janusz Bardach, a
Jew whose family hailed from Odessa in Russia, but who grew to maturity in the
Polish town of Wlodzimierz-Wolynski. There, Bardach experienced some of the
discrimination meted out to Jews in Poland. (It would explode into murderous frenzy
during the period of the German occupation, when many Poles proved eager to lend
the Nazis a hand in their genocidal designs against Jews.)
45
“In school I sensed that
my classmates didn’t truly accept me; I felt I was a stranger among them. Some called
me names and made me feel that I couldn’t live happily among Poles because I was
Jewish.”
46
But the family held fast amidst the anti-Jewish racism, which included
commercial boycotts and harassment by government bureaucrats.
continued
STALIN’S TERROR
132
When the Nazis invaded Poland in September 1939, Bardach was dealt a “stinging
reminder” of his outsider status: the Polish army declined Jews’ offers to help
defend the nation. Bardach joined the flight of military-age males to the east of the
country. Having imbibed left-socialist influences in his adolescence, he was happy
to meet Soviet troops storming into eastern Poland (they were occupying the eastern
half of the country, as agreed in the previous month’s Nazi–Soviet pact). The
heroic Soviets would protect Jews like him from Nazi depredations, Bardach was
convinced. “I believed that the Soviet Union was a paradise for the oppressed, ruled
by workers and peasants, and that the Red Army was the enforcer of social justice.
I couldn’t imagine them as my enemies.” His joy only increased when he learned
that his home town of Wlodzimierz-Wolynski would be just inside the Soviet
occupation zone.
Bardach’s faith in the Soviet revolution began to waver when he was forced to serve
as a civilian witness accompanying a unit of the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, on
a night-time raid of numerous local homes. His brother, Jurek, was caught up in the
dragnet and badly beaten during interrogation; so when, in summer 1940, the Red
Army announced a military draft of men of Bardach’s age, he was dismayed, and
sought to flunk the medical. To his further chagrin, he was pronounced fully fit. He
chose assignment to a tank corps, since it offered a term of four years’ service instead
of the usual five.
In June 1941, the Germans broke the Nazi–Soviet pact and launched their invasion
of eastern Poland and the USSR. Bardach’s thoughts turned to his family on the front
lines. He himself was soon in mortal danger, however. Exhausted, with Soviet forces
in pell-mell retreat, Bardach lost concentration at the helm of his T-34 tank. While
traversing a river, he inadvertently left a hatch open, and the tank capsized.
For this, Bardach was sentenced to death. “I sat with my face in my hand, stunned
by how quickly and easily the death sentence was pronounced.” Then the first of
several events, so fortuitous as to be almost miraculous, came to his salvation. An
NKVD officer recognized his surname – the officer had grown up next to the
Bardachs in Odessa! Bardach’s sentence was commuted to ten years’ hard labor.
He was sent to a way-station, Burepolom, in northwest Russia. En route, in a crowded
and unsanitary cattle-car, he took to socializing with the urkas – the common
criminals, with their own enduring subculture. Most memoirs by Soviet intellectuals
in the Gulag exude horror of the urka. Many inmates reported savage treatment at
their hands. But Bardach somehow established a rapport that lasted through his
incarceration, and made of the urkas valued allies, sometimes friends.
The urkas told him about his ultimate destination, Kolyma. “There, it was said, the
guards shot prisoners for sport or sent them to work without coats or boots and
placed bets on how long it would take them to freeze to death.” Bardach was
Tens of thousands of people were executed, and hundreds of thousands more
consigned to the Gulag, which now expanded to include camps in occupied
territories. When the Nazi–Soviet Pact collapsed and Germany invaded Soviet-
occupied Poland in June 1941, fresh catastrophe descended. Forced into pell-mell
retreat, NKVD killing squads massacred many of those whom they had imprisoned
on Polish territory. Legions of others were deported on foot, in scenes “hauntingly
similar to the marches undertaken by the prisoners of the Nazi concentration camps
four years later”
47
(see Chapter 6).
The tide turned in 1943, with the critical Soviet victories at Stalingrad and
Kursk. By 1944, the Soviets were moving back into Poland and then on to German
territory in East Prussia. Some of the destruction wreaked upon German civilians
STALIN’S TERROR
133
terrified. “I had never done hard physical work, and the thought of spending ten
years at it was terrifying...I had little chance of surviving.”
At Burepolom, Bardach was set to tree-felling. “Starvation was routine,” he
recounted. “We weren’t given enough food to sustain us throughout one day of
hard work, let alone weeks and months. Starving prisoners hunted for mice and rats
with sticks and stones. They cooked them on the wood-burning stove and peeled
off the fur before engulfing them. It made me sick to watch, despite the emptiness
in my own stomach. At times I felt I could eat anything....Gradually I learned that
anything I could chew – even a leaf or fresh twig – gave the illusion of eating.”
Bardach was then launched on an epic journey across the length of the Soviet Union,
by railway car and “slave ship,” to Kolyma – the very harshest outpost of the Gulag.
On arrival, he was “assigned to clear a new area of boulders, stones, roots, and
shrubs.” He learned crucial survival skills, especially the fine art of faking work by
“creat[ing] the illusion of activity” and thereby marshaling his energy. Still, “the
oppressive work regimen was a form of torture in itself. Sometimes I thought hacking
the cement-hard soil with a wrought-iron crowbar was unbearable. I felt the limits
of my endurance approaching...hunger made me weak and defenseless...I still
wanted to live, but I thought about injuring myself as so many other prisoners had
done, hoping to win several days in the hospital, to be assigned to a lighter job, to
be transferred to another camp.”
The work proceeded even in the intense cold of the coldest populated region on the
planet: “Touching a metal tool with a bare hand could tear off the skin, and going
to the bathroom was extremely dangerous. A bout of diarrhea could land you in the
snow forever.” Disease was rife amid the hard labor, minimal nutrition, and squalid
living conditions. Bardach came down with scurvy, and was sent to the hospital
zone. There, another semi-miracle occurred. After successfully inflating his medical
credentials (he had a year of medical training in prewar Poland), Bardach was granted
a post as an orderly. He was released after the war, and returned home – only to
discover that virtually his entire family had perished at Nazi hands.
by vengeful Soviet armies is discussed in Box 6a on “The Nazis’ Other Victims.”
Notable here is the Gulag’s relentless expansion into Germany and other newly
occupied lands (Romania, Bulgaria). In Germany, the so-called spetslagerya were
sometimes established in former Nazi concentration camps. Once again, Soviet policy
aimed to undermine any national resistance to the new Soviet order. The inmates were
predominantly “judges, lawyers, entrepreneurs, businessmen, doctors and journal-
ists.” Of the 240,000 incarcerated, over one-third – 95,000 people – perished in the
spetslagerya, while camps in Romania were more deadly still.
48
In addition, 600,000
Japanese prisoners were taken during the few days that the two countries were at war
in August 1945. The camp system in fact reached its apogee well after the Second
World War had ended, in 1950.
Finally, in one of modern history’s most tragic ironies, Soviet prisoners-of-war
who survived the Nazis’ genocidal treatment (see Box 6a) to be repatriated were
arrested en masse in the USSR on suspicion of collaboration with the Germans. Most
were sentenced to long terms in the Gulag, with hundreds of thousands consigned
to mine uranium for the Soviet atomic bomb; “few survived the experience.”
49
As
Solzhenitsyn noted sardonically: “In Russian captivity, as in German captivity, the
worst lot of all was reserved for the Russians.”
50
■
THE DESTRUCTION OF NATIONAL MINORITIES
We have already seen that Soviet skepticism towards nationalist forces led to genocidal
mass repression and man-made famine in Ukraine, whose people were the most
powerful and resource-rich of those inclined towards autonomy or independence.
51
During the Second World War, this mindset unleashed a campaign of similar
viciousness against an array of national minorities across the southern territories of
the Soviet empire. The Soviet Germans living in the Volga region, numbering well
over a million, were a predictable target once Hitler’s Germany launched its invasion
of the Soviet Union in 1941. Depicted as saboteurs and “fifth columnists,” they
were rounded up and deported from territories they had settled for centuries – some
1.2 million in all.
52
The Nazi drive into the Caucasus and Crimea in 1942 spelled doom for a host
of other minorities there and in Soviet Central Asia. Accused of collaborating with
the German invader, polyglot groups were rounded up by the NKVD and expelled
from their homelands – generally under terrible conditions, and to desolate territories
where agriculture was difficult and infrastructure non-existent. “The seven peoples
deported during the war were: Balkars, Chechens, Crimean Tatars,
53
Ingushi,
Karachai, Kalmyks, and Meskhetians. The deportations began with the Karachai and
the Kalmyks near the end of 1943, continued in the first half of 1944 with Chechens,
Ingushi, and Balkars, and culminated in the removal of the Crimean Tatars in the
middle of that year.”
54
With the translocation went a systematic assault on the
foundations of these minorities’ cultures:
For the first time, Stalin had decided to eliminate not just members of particular,
suspect nationalities, or categories of political “enemies,” but entire nations – men,
STALIN’S TERROR
134
women, children, grandparents....After they had gone, the names of all of the
deported peoples were eliminated from official documents – even from the Great
Soviet Encyclopædia. The authorities wiped their homelands off the map, abolishing
the Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Republic, the Volga-German Autonomous
Republic, the Kabardino-Balkar Autonomous Republic, and the Karachai
Autonomous Province. The Crimean Autonomous Republic was also liquidated,
and Crimea simply became another Soviet province.
55
The devastation of the Chechen nation was only one of many, but it had especially
fateful consequences. The Chechen genocide – Applebaum estimates that 78,000
Chechens died on transport trains alone
56
– resonates to the present. The fierce
Chechen struggle for independence in the 1990s (see Box 5a) reflects memories of
the genocide during the Second World War. The response of the post-Soviet Russian
government has been a new round of genocide, with tens of thousands of Chechens
killed and hundreds of thousands more displaced as refugees.
57
In the final months of his life, Stalin directed his paranoid zeal against a minority
that so far had largely escaped targeting as such: Soviet Jews. Those arrested in the
so-called “Doctors’ Plot” in January 1953 were mostly Jewish, and fear reigned that
the arrests presaged a repeat of the Great Purge. But in March, the dictator died.
Rapidly, a “thaw” spread through Soviet life. Over the course of the next decade, the
vast majority of Gulag prisoners were released, the “camp-industrial complex” was
shut down, and many of the dead and still living were formally rehabilitated. Limited
criticisms were aired of Stalin and the cult of personality, “the most grandiose in
history,”
58
that surrounded him.
The height of the thaw came under Stalin’s eventual successor, Nikita Khrushchev.
A Ukrainian who had helped consign millions of his fellow Ukrainians to death
or the Gulag, Khrushchev nonetheless permitted the first real blast of truth about
life in the camps to be published in the USSR: Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s novella
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. But in 1964, Khrushchev was ousted for his
failed brinkmanship during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and his disastrous domes-
tic agricultural policies. A new chill descended. When Solzhenitsyn completed his
massive three-volume study of The Gulag Archipelago, he could publish it only abroad;
and though the work won its author the Nobel Prize for literature, it led to his house
arrest and forced exile. Only with a new and deeper thaw under Mikhail Gorbachev
did a genuine reckoning with the Stalinist and Gulag legacies begin – although post-
Soviet citizens have proven notably reluctant to revisit this aspect of the national
past.
59
■
STALIN AND GENOCIDE
The misery and violence inflicted on the Soviet Union during Stalin’s reign would
seem, on its face, to constitute genocide. Certainly in the case of the destruction of
the national minorities, the term seems unavoidable. Not only were hundreds of
thousands of minority members killed – through execution, lethal deportation,
disease, privation – but a systematic assault was mounted on the foundations of their
STALIN’S TERROR
135
national cultures. A similar approach was adopted in the case of Ukraine and occupied
Poland.
The application of a genocide framework to the human havoc of the Ukrainian
famine (1931–32) is more controversial. But the famine killed millions; it took place
against a backdrop of persecution, mass execution, and incarceration clearly aimed
at undermining Ukrainians as a national group. Moreover, we know from the
documentary record that a clear picture of what was occurring in Ukraine was
available to the Soviet leadership throughout the famine. The expulsion of vast
numbers of “kulaks” to marginal territories; the continuation of grain seizures at the
STALIN’S TERROR
136
Figure 5.1 A diehard supporter
of Joseph Stalin (larger photo)
and Vladimir Lenin carries their
portraits in Moscow’s Red
Square on the fiftieth anniversary
of Stalin’s death, March 5, 2003.
Many Russians who survived
Stalin’s reign remember it as a
time of economic development,
national unity, and patriotic
pride. They yearn for the return
of a “strong hand” amidst the
social dislocation of the post-
communist period.
Source: Alexander Natruskin –
Reuters/Corbis.
height of the famine; the refusal to distribute reserve stores of grain to starving
peasants while preventing them from fleeing the famished countryside – these actions,
it seems to me and to most genocide scholars, should be considered genocidal.
As for the mass political repressions, particularly those against the “kulaks” and the
Communist Party itself, we confront again perhaps the deepest deficiency of the UN
Genocide Convention – its failure to include political and socioeconomic groups
among the categories of genocide’s victims. Not surprisingly, Stalin’s USSR played a
significant role in forestalling efforts to include these groups. However, most scholars
believe today that this exclusion is outmoded, founded on realpolitik and on the
relative novelty of “politicides” at the time the Convention was drafted. By contrast,
in the contemporary period, political and socioeconomic groups are probably most
likely to be targeted in campaigns of mass killing. In this sordid aspect of twentieth-
century history, Stalin was the trail-blazer.
■
FURTHER STUDY
Note: The Stalinist period in the USSR has become a classic study of dictatorship and
political terror, generating a literature second only to studies of Nazism and the
Jewish Holocaust (Chapter 6). The following is a small sample of works in English.
Martin Amis, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million. New York: Hyperion,
2002. British novelist’s uneven but evocative study of Stalin’s era and personality.
Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History. London: Penguin, 2003. Winner of the Pulitzer
Prize; an epic single-volume history of the Soviet forced-labor camps.
Janusz Bardach, Man is Wolf to Man: Surviving the Gulag, trans. Kathleen Gleeson.
Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999. Vivid memoir, sampled in
this chapter.
Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-
Famine. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Conveys the single-minded
sadism and human destruction of the Ukrainian famine of 1929–33.
Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1990. Updated version of Conquest’s seminal 1960s study.
Stéphane Courtois et al., The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression,
trans. Jonathan Murphy and Mark Kramer. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1999. Massive indictment of communist regimes; includes Nicolas Werth’s
study of the USSR, “A State Against Its People.”
R.W. Davies and Stephen G. Wheatcroft, The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture,
1931–1933. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Volume in the series “The
Industrialisation of Soviet Russia”; usefully consulted alongside Conquest’s
Harvest of Sorrow.
Miron Dolot, Execution by Hunger: The Hidden Holocaust. New York: W.W. Norton,
1985. Memoir of the Ukrainian famine.
Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: A History of the Russian Revolution. New York:
Viking, 1996. Peerless study of the wars and crises that brought Lenin and Stalin
to power.
Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet
STALIN’S TERROR
137
Russia in the 1930s. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Individual per-
spectives on broad social transformations; see also The Russian Revolution,
1917–1932, a concise account.
Eugenia Ginzburg, Journey into the Whirlwind. New York: Harvest, 2002. Account
of arrest and the Gulag; see also its sequel, Within the Whirlwind.
Adam Hochschild, The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin. New York: Viking,
1994. Taut work on history and memory.
Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope, trans. Max Hayward. New York: The
Modern Library, 1999. Powerful, poetic recollections of Stalinist terror.
Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar. London: Phoenix, 2004.
Montefiore’s description of life in Stalin’s “court” is gossipy but galvanizing.
Robert Service, Stalin: A Biography. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 2005.
A very serviceable biography, though brisk with the human consequences of
Stalin’s rule.
Varlam Shalamov, Kolyma Tales. London: Penguin, 1994. Documentary-style short
stories about the Kolyma camps, by a former inmate.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956. New York:
HarperPerennial, 2002. Abridged one-volume version of Solzhenitsyn’s classic
three-volume study of the camp system.
Robert W. Thurston, Life and Terror in Stalin’s Russia, 1934–1941. New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 1996. Fine social history.
Chris Ward, ed., The Stalinist Dictatorship (2nd edn). London: Arnold, 1998.
Comprehensive survey of the roots and functioning of the Stalinist system.
■
NOTES
1 Richard Rubenstein, The Age of Triage: Fear and Hope in an Overcrowded World (Boston,
MA: Beacon Press, 1983), p. 19.
2 Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History (London: Penguin, 2004), p. 3. “Gulag” was an
acronym for the Russian term Glavnoe upravlenie lagerei, meaning “Main Camp
Administration” (ibid.).
3 Robert Service, Stalin: A Biography (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 2005), p. 602.
4 Arno J. Mayer, The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 45.
5 Alec Nove, Stalinism and After (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1975), p. 23.
6 Lenin quoted in Nicolas Werth, “A State Against Its People: Violence, Repression, and
Terror in the Soviet Union,” in Stéphane Courtois et al., The Black Book of Communism:
Crimes, Terror, Repression, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Mark Kramer (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 70.
7 Werth, no friend of Leninism, argues that “the use of terror as a key instrument in the
Leninist political project had been foreseen during the outbreak of the civil war, and was
intended to be of limited duration” (“A State Against Its People,” p. 265).
8 “At the maximum, the American Relief Administration and its associated organizations
were feeding over 10,400,000 mouths, and various other organizations nearly two million
more, for a total of more than 12,300,000” (Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow:
Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986),
p. 56). This must qualify as one of the most extraordinary and successful “humanitarian
interventions” in history, saving millions of lives.
STALIN’S TERROR
138
9 Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (London: Phoenix, 2004),
p. 27.
10 Service, Stalin: A Biography, p. 174.
11 In exile, Trotsky founded the “Fourth International” of the socialist movement, and
became the most outspoken opponent of Stalin’s policies. A Stalinist agent tracked him
down and killed him in Mexico City in 1940.
12 Applebaum, Gulag, p. 62.
13 Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow, p. 19.
14 Lenin quoted in Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, p. 45.
15 Service, Stalin: A Biography, p. 267.
16 This was in one respect ironic, since in the pre-revolutionary era Stalin had been one of
the strongest proponents of “let[ting] the peasants grab the land and do with it whatever
they wanted”; he considered Lenin’s plans for full state ownership to be “naïve and
unrealisable.” Also ironically, in the light of his subsequent genocides against Ukrainians
and Caucasians, in the 1920s Stalin was the Communist Party’s leading exponent of “the
principle that each people in the Soviet state should have scope for national and ethnic
self-expression.” Service, Stalin: A Biography, pp. 94, 202.
17 Applebaum, Gulag, p. 515.
18 See Werth, “A State Against Its People,” p. 155, with an “estimate that approximately
300,000 deportees died during the process of deportation.”
19 This is Robert Conquest’s assertion (The Harvest of Sorrow, p. 196), but is contested by
R.W. Davies and Stephen G. Wheatcroft in The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture,
1931–1933 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 440–41.
20 Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow, p. 224. Two critical policy decisions were the January
1933 order to prevent peasants from fleeing the famine-stricken countryside, which
“effectively decreed the death of millions who were starving,” and the continued export
of grain “‘in the interests of industrialization.’” See Werth, “A State Against Its People,”
p. 167.
21 Testimony quoted in Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow, p. 245.
22 Davies and Wheatcroft, The Years of Hunger, p. 415. According to Werth, about four
million of the victims were Ukrainian (“A State Against Its People,” p. 167).
23 Service, Stalin: A Biography, p. 495.
24 See Applebaum, Gulag, Ch. 4.
25 Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow, pp. 127–28.
26 Leo Kuper, Genocide: Its Political Use in the Twentieth Century (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1981), p. 150.
27 Kuper, Genocide, p. 150.
28 Robert Conquest, Kolyma: The Arctic Death Camps (London: Methuen, 1978), p. 229.
29 Adam Hochschild, The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin (New York: Viking,
1994), p. xxv. “I asked four . . . researchers, who between them have written or edited
more than half a dozen books on the gulag, what was the total Kolyma death toll. One
estimated it at 250,000, one at 300,000, one at 800,000, and one at ‘more than
1,000,000.’...We will probably never know the answer” (p. 237).
30 Kuper, Genocide, p. 150.
31 “I have not, it must be noted, found any memoirs describing ‘selections’ of the sort that
took place in German death camps. That is, I have not read of regular selections which
ended in weak prisoners being taken aside and shot....Weak prisoners were not
murdered upon arrival in some of the further-flung camps, but rather given a period of
‘quarantine,’ both to ensure that any illnesses they were carrying would not spread, and
to allow them to ‘fatten up,’ to recover their health after long months in prison and
terrible journeys.” Applebaum, Gulag, p. 175.
32 Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, p. 151. Robert Conquest calls the Kirov
killing “the crime of the century” because it became “the keystone of the entire edifice of
terror and suffering by which Stalin secured his grip on the Soviet peoples.” Conquest,
The Great Terror: A Reassessment, p. 37.
STALIN’S TERROR
139
33 Werth, “A State Against Its People,” pp. 190, 264.
34 Martin Amis, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million (New York: Hyperion,
2002), p. 32.
35 Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, p. 214.
36 The strength of appeals to solidarity and party unity in extracting confessions from the
“Old Bolsheviks” was memorably captured in Arthur Koestler’s 1940 novel, Darkness at
Noon (New York: Bantam, 1984).
37 Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago Two (New York: Harper & Row, 1975),
p. 633.
38 Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope (New York: Modern Library, 1999),
pp. 322–23, 352.
39 See, e.g., Robert W. Thurston, Life and Terror in Stalin’s Russia, 1934–1941 (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), pp. 79–80.
40 Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment, p. 433.
41 In part to shift blame from Stalin, the purge became known subsequently as the
Yezhovshchina, or “The Reign of Yezhov,” in Werth’s translation (“A State Against Its
People,” p. 184).
42 Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment, p. 438.
43 The Nazis uncovered some 4,000 of the corpses during Operation Barbarossa in 1941.
The Soviet regime accused them of spreading libels, and blamed the Nazis for the crime
at the Nuremberg tribunal.
44 Applebaum, Gulag, pp. 382–83.
45 See Jan Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002).
46 Janusz Bardach, Man is Wolf to Man: Surviving the Gulag (Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 1999). The quoted passages in this section are drawn from pp. xiii, 11,
19, 88, 106, 114, 133–34, 192, 204, 220, 231, and 233.
47 Applebaum, Gulag, pp. 378–79.
48 Applebaum, Gulag, p. 410.
49 Service, Stalin: A Biography, p. 508.
50 Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago One (New York: Harper & Row, 1974),
p. 240.
51 An earlier precedent, important for understanding Leninist–Stalinist continuity, is the
genocide against the Don and Kuban Cossacks during the civil war of 1919 to 1920.
According to Eric Weitz, “‘Cossack’ came to mean anti-Soviet, a synonym for ‘enemy’
that carried an implicit racialization of a group defined not even by ethnicity but by its
special service relationship to the czarist state.” The death-toll was 300,000 to 500,000
out of a population of three million. Eric D. Weitz, A Century of Genocide: Utopias of
Race and Nation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), p. 69; see also Werth,
“A State Against Its People,” pp. 98–102.
52 Finnish speakers in the Karelia region of northwest Russia also suffered after the Finns,
seeking to regain territories lost to Stalin in the winter war of 1939–40, joined the Nazi
thrust into the Soviet Union.
53 On the Crimean Tatars, see Brian Glyn Williams, “Hidden Ethnocide in the Soviet
Muslim Borderlands: The Ethnic Cleansing of the Crimean Tatars,” Journal of Genocide
Research, 4: 3 (2002), pp. 357–73.
54 Lyman H. Legters, “Soviet Deportation of Whole Nations: A Genocidal Process,” ch. 4
in Samuel Totten et al., Century of Genocide: Eyewitness Accounts and Critical Views (New
York: Garland Publishing, 1997), pp. 112–35. See also Institute for the Study of the
USSR, Genocide in the USSR: Studies in Group Destruction (New York: The Scarecrow
Press, 1958); J. Otto Pohl, “Stalin’s Genocide against the ‘Repressed Peoples,’” Journal
of Genocide Research, 2: 2 (June 2000), pp. 267–93.
55 Applebaum, Gulag, p. 388.
56 Ibid. According to Nicolas Werth, “Of the 608,749 people deported from the Caucasus,
146,892, or nearly 1 in 4, had died by 1 October 1948....Of the 228,392 people
STALIN’S TERROR
140
deported from the Crimea, 44,887 had died after four years.” Werth, “A State Against
Its People,” p. 223.
57 After Stalin’s death, the remnants of some deported nationalities were allowed to return
to their former territories, but the extinguished political units were not always revived.
58 Service, Stalin: A Biography, p. 592.
59 The epilogue of Applebaum’s Gulag explores this phenomenon.
STALIN’S TERROR
141
BOX 5A CHECHNYA
As discussed in Chapter 5, the people of Chechnya were among a number
of nationalities accused of complicity with the Nazis during the Second World
War, rounded up, and deported under murderous conditions to distant and
barren lands. At least 390,000 Chechens – perhaps many more – were uprooted
in this way. Fully a quarter of them died en route to their exile, and survivors
faced a constant struggle against the elements and thin soils.
1
After Stalin’s death,
most of these populations were returned to their homelands; but bitter
memories lingered, and explain something of the extraordinary persistence of
Chechen rebel forces in their war for independence.
2
One must dig deeper, however, for the roots of Chechen nationalism and
its conflict with “Greater Russia.” Chechens were at the forefront of efforts to
resist Russian expansion during the mid-nineteenth century. When the North
Caucasus was finally overwhelmed by tsarist forces and incorporated into the
empire, some 600,000 Caucasians – 100,000 of them Chechens – “were sent
to the Ottoman Empire, where tens of thousands perished from starvation and
disease.”
3
The Chechens rallied after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, but their
declaration of independence was doomed by renewed Russian (now Soviet)
expansionism. The Bolsheviks occupied Chechnya, and in 1924 established
the Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Region that Stalin would cancel in the
1940s.
The great liberalizing wave that struck the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe
in the late 1980s resulted in the breakup of the Soviet empire; but Chechnya
was a federal unit of Russia, not a Soviet union republic. When Russian leader
Boris Yeltsin took over from Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, he decided that
no secession from Russia itself would be allowed. In the Chechen case, there were
also material considerations: a major oil pipeline ran through Chechnya, which
was home to rich petroleum resources of its own. Whoever controlled them was
guaranteed a strategic presence in the region as a whole.
Russian policy also reflected an ingrained racism towards Chechens.
Chechnya had long been an “obsession” for the Russians, writes journalist
David Remnick: “an image of Islamic defiance, an embodiment of the primitive,
the devious, the elusive.” Chechens were seen as bumpkins and “black asses.”
“Yeltsin knew well that for many Russians the Chechens were nothing more than
a tribe of ‘thieving niggers.’”
4
STALIN’S TERROR
142
In 1991, the mercurial Chechen leader, Dzhokar Dudayev – previously a
general in the Soviet air force – rebelled against Moscow and declared Chechnya
independent. Under his rule, “Chechnya became an epicenter of financial
scams and illegal trade in oil and contraband, and a safe haven for criminals from
all over Russia,” while violence against ethnic Russians in the territory rose
alarmingly.
5
The bombastic, alcoholic Yeltsin countered by seeking to undermine the
Chechen regime from within.
6
When a Russian-led assault on Grozny, using
Chechen forces opposed to Dudayev, ended in shambles, the Russians reacted
with fury. In December 1994, 40,000 Russian troops – mostly ill-trained
conscripts – were sent into Chechnya. Yeltsin apparently believed the declaration
Russian Federation
Georgia
Chechnya
Nadterechnaya
Chervlennaya
Gudermes
Groznyy
Terek
River
Sunzha
River
Martan
River
Argun River
Terek
River
Argun
Shali
25 mi
25 km
Urus-
Martan
Vedeno
C
a
u
c
a
s
u
s
M
o
u
n
t
a
i
n
s
N
CHECHNYA
LOW/HILLS/MOUNTAINS
Map 5a.1 Chechnya
Source: Map provided by WorldAtlas.com
STALIN’S TERROR
143
of his defense minister, Pavel Grachev, that the territory could be conquered
“in two hours by a single paratrooper regiment.”
7
Two years later, Russian forces
were still there.
The first assault on Grozny was disastrous. Russian tank columns and troop
concentrations were torn apart by hit-and-run rebel attacks. The humiliated
Russians responded with mass atrocity against civilians. The bombing and
shelling of Grozny was “the heaviest artillery bombardment that anyone had
seen since the Second World War.”
8
Numerous other towns and villages where
rebels were allegedly present were also targeted. Tens of thousands of Chechens
were killed, overwhelmingly civilians. In a grim irony, many of the victims were
ethnic Russians who lacked the contacts in the countryside that allowed many
Chechens to flee to refuge in the Caucasus foothills. When the Russians finally
claimed control of Grozny in March, visiting journalists marveled at “the sheer
scale of the destruction,” with the city “not only in ruins but...destroyed [to]
its very foundations.” Even years later, the heart of the city remained “a desert
scene of rubble and burnt-out buildings.”
9
To the extent that Russians discriminated in their killing, the strategy was
predominantly gendercidal (see Chapter 13). “I killed a lot,” a Russian soldier
returned from Chechnya told Maura Reynolds of the Los Angeles Times:
I wouldn’t touch women or children, as long as they didn’t fire at me. But
I would kill all the men I met during mopping-up operations. I didn’t feel
sorry for them one bit. They deserved it. I wouldn’t even listen to the pleas
or see the tears of their women when they asked me to spare their men.
I simply took them aside and killed them.
10
In keeping with such strategies, mass round-ups and detentions of Chechen men
were staged, with detainees passed through “filtration camps” run by the Russian
military and FSB (formerly the KGB). Torture was frequent in the camps, and
“disappearances” rampant.
All of this occurred in Europe; yet few Europeans, or others, raised their
voices in protest. Russia, even in its post-Soviet incarnation, is a great power, and
a nuclear one. European governments have been more interested in courting it
and profiting from its immense resources than in criticizing “internal” practices,
even genocidal ones. The response of the Clinton and Bush administrations
was likewise “woefully late and pitifully restrained.”
11
Terrifying and destructive as the war was, it was just the first round. In 1996,
astonishingly, rebel forces penetrated and reoccupied Grozny, holding it for
weeks against a sustained, and again indiscriminate, Russian counter-attack. For
the Russian public, this was the final straw. Public opposition to the slaughter
(albeit mainly to the deaths of Russian conscripts) drove Yeltsin’s approval ratings
to dismally low levels. The Russian media enjoyed their most brilliant moment
since 1917, with press reports and TV investigations relentlessly documenting
the Chechen chaos. Finally, Russian forces pulled out in defeat, leaving the
STALIN’S TERROR
144
territory still nominally part of Russia, but effectively in the hands of Chechen
rebels and warlords.
With the economy and infrastructure virtually destroyed, Chechnya again
lapsed into lawlessness. In September 1999, Yeltsin, now a lame duck, sent
the troops back in. His policy was energetically continued and expanded by
his successor, Vladimir Putin, who pledged pungently to “corner the bandits
in the shithouse and wipe them out.”
12
Putin believed that a hard line on
Chechnya would help him consolidate his power and appeal to voters in future
elections.
13
Under Putin, the murderous Russian tactics of the previous conflict were
revived, from indiscriminate bombardment to filtration camps. Again adult
males were special targets. Human Rights Watch stated that “every adult
Chechen male” was being treated “as if he were a rebel fighter.”
14
Chechen
women were also assaulted and raped on an increasing scale.
15
None of it worked. Once again, Russian forces became mired in an
intractable guerrilla war. As the quagmire deepened, Putin sought to indigenize
the war. “Chechenization” became the new buzzword; but as fast as the Russians
could come up with new satraps, the rebels assassinated them. “Who but a
masochist would want to run Chechnya now?” wondered The Economist, after
President Akhmad Kadyrov was blown up by a rebel bomb in May 2004.
16
As for the rebels, their own actions, within Chechnya and beyond, were
becoming ever more atrocious and unrestrained. In 2004 alone, hundreds of
schoolchildren died in the town of Beslan in neighbouring Ingushetia, when
Russian forces stormed a school seized by rebels. Two civilian passenger planes
downed by female Chechen rebels – the so-called “Black Widows”
17
– added
to the casualty count.
The toll among Chechen civilians, though, was vastly greater – probably
approaching 100,000 as of early 2005. Matthew Evangelista wrote in Current
History that “a plausible case” could be made that Russia has “violated the
Genocide Convention for ‘acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or
in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group.’”
18
If Russian violence has remained constant, so has the “mixture of eager
complicity and mute acquiescence” displayed by the outside world.
19
After
September 11, 2001, Putin’s regime positioned itself as a valuable ally in the “war
on terror.” This provided an ideal camouflage and justification for Russia’s
continuing genocidal campaign against Chechen Muslims. Lindsey Hilsum
writes: “Chechnya is a shameful example of western leaders refusing to confront
another government on human rights abuses and war crimes because, in the end,
strategic and political issues matter more. Chechnya is complex and dangerous
and miserable, and we just don’t care enough to try to make a difference.”
20
STALIN’S TERROR
145
■
FURTHER STUDY
Matthew Evangelista, The Chechen Wars: Will Russia Go the Way of the Soviet
Union? Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2002. Astute
political analysis, with a chapter on “War Crimes and Russia’s International
Standing.”
Carlotta Gall and Thomas de Waal, Chechnya: Calamity in the Caucasus.New
York: New York University Press, 1998. Well-informed journalistic account
of the first Chechen war.
Human Rights Watch, Swept Under: Torture, Forced Disappearances, and Extra-
judicial Killings during Sweep Operations in Chechnya. February 2002.
Available at http://www.hrw.org/reports/2002/russchech. Major HRW
report on atrocities in the renewed war against Chechens.
Anna Politkovskaya, A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya. Chicago,
IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Brave account by a Russian reporter
on the scene.
■
NOTES
1 On the struggle to survive after deportation, see Michela Pohl, “‘It Cannot Be That
Our Graves Will Be Here’: The Survival of Chechen and Ingush Deportees in
Kazakhstan, 1944–1957,” Journal of Genocide Research, 4: 3 (2002), pp. 401–30.
2 See Birgit Brauer, “Chechens and the Survival of Their Cultural Identity in Exile,”
Journal of Genocide Research, 4: 3 (2002), pp. 387–400. Brauer writes (p. 399):
“One of the side effects of the deportation was that the surviving Chechens became
much closer and stronger as a people. Their families and villages may have been torn
apart, but their defiance against these circumstances led to the development of a
national identity.”
3 Tony Wood, “The Case for Chechnya,” New Left Review, 30 (November–
December 2004), p. 10.
4 David Remnick, Resurrection: The Struggle for a New Russia (New York: Vintage,
1998), pp. 266, 271.
5 Nabi Abdullaev, “Chechnya Ten Years Later,” Current History (October 2004),
p. 332.
6 President Dudayev was assassinated by a Russian missile in April 1996; his
successor, Aslan Maskhadov, was killed in March 2005.
7 Grachev quoted in Remnick, Resurrection, p. 278.
8 Carlotta Gall and Thomas de Waal, Chechnya: Calamity in the Caucasus (New York:
New York University Press, 1998), p. 219.
9 Gall and de Waal, Chechnya, p. 227.
10 Maura Reynolds, “War Has No Rules for Russian Forces Battling Chechen Rebels,”
Los Angeles Times, September 17, 2000.
11 Remnick, Resurrection, p. 284.
12 Sebastian Smith, “Grozny Gangsters Hold Sway in a Wasteland Created by Russia,”
The Times, December 11, 2004.
13 See the trenchant analysis of Putin’s policies, and their underlying motivations, in
Wood, “The Case for Chechnya,” pp. 27–31.
STALIN’S TERROR
146
14 Human Rights Watch cited in Geoffrey York, “Russians Accused of Executing
Chechens,” Globe and Mail, February 14, 2000.
15 See “Serious Violations of Women’s Human Rights in Chechnya,” Human Rights
Watch backgrounder, January 2002, http://www.hrw.org/backgrounder/eca/
chechnya_women.htm.
16 “A Gaping Hole,” The Economist, May 15, 2004.
17 See Chris Stephen, “The Black Widows of Chechnya,” The Scotsman, September
17, 2004, http://news.scotsman.com/topics.cfm?tid=610andid=1090202004.
18 Matthew Evangelista, The Chechen Wars: Will Russia Go the Way of the Soviet
Union? (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2002), p. 142; see also
p. 177.
19 Wood, “The Case for Chechnya,” p. 36.
20 Lindsey Hilsum, “The Conflict the West Always Ignores,” New Statesman, January
26, 2004.
The Jewish Holocaust
■
INTRODUCTION
The genocide of European Jews – which many scholars and others call simply “the
Holocaust”
1
– “is perhaps the one genocide of which every educated person has
heard.”
2
Between 1941 and 1945, five to six million Jews were systematically
murdered by the Nazi regime, its allies, and its surrogates in the Nazi-occupied
territories.
3
Yet despite the extraordinary scale and intensity of the genocide, its
prominence in recent decades was far from preordained. The Second World War
killed upwards of fifty million people, and attitudes in the two decades following the
Nazi defeat tended to mirror those of European countries and leaders during the
war, who generally refused to ascribe special significance or urgency to the Jewish
catastrophe. Only with the Israeli capture of Adolf Eichmann, the epitome of the
“banality of evil” in Hannah Arendt’s famous phrase, and his trial in Jerusalem in
1961 did the Jewish catastrophe begin truly to entrench itself in the Western
consciousness, and become the paradigmatic genocide of human history. Even today,
in the evaluation of genocide scholar Yehuda Bauer, “the impact of the Holocaust is
growing, not diminishing.”
4
This impact is expressed in the diverse debates about the Holocaust. Among the
searching questions asked are: How could the systematic murder of millions of
helpless individuals have sprung from one of the most developed and “civilized” of
Western states? What are the links to European anti-semitism? How central a figure
was Hitler in the genesis and unfolding of the slaughter? What part did “ordinary
men” and “ordinary Germans” play in the extermination campaign? How extensive
was Jewish resistance? What was the role of the Allies (notably Britain, France, the
147
CHAPTER 6
USSR, and the United States), both before and during the Second World War, in
abandoning Jews to destruction at Nazi hands? And what is the relationship between
the Jewish Holocaust and the postwar state of Israel? This chapter addresses these
controversies in its latter sections, while also touching on the debate over the alleged
“uniqueness” of the Jewish tragedy.
■
ORIGINS
Until the later nineteenth century, Jews were uniquely stigmatized within the
European social hierarchy. Medieval Christianity “held the Jews to violate the moral
order of the world. By rejecting Jesus, by allegedly having killed him, the Jews stood
in defiant opposition to the otherwise universally accepted conception of God and
Man, denigrating and defiling, by their very existence, all that is sacred. As such,
Jews came to represent symbolically and discursively much of the evil in the world.”
5
Jews – especially male Jews (see Chapter 13) – were reviled as “uprooted, troublesome,
malevolent, shiftless.”
6
The Catholic church, and later the Protestant offshoot founded by the virulently
anti-semitic Martin Luther, assailed Jews as “thirsty bloodhounds and murderers of
all Christendom.”
7
The most primitive and powerful myth was the so-called “blood
libel”: the claim that Jews seized and murdered Gentile children in order to use their
blood in the baking of ceremonial bread for the Passover celebration.
8
Fueled by this
and other fantasies, regular pogroms – localized campaigns of violence, killing, and
repression – scarred European Jewish history. At various points, Jews who refused to
convert to Christianity were also rounded up and expelled, most notoriously from
Spain and Portugal in 1492.
The rise of modernity and the nation-state recast traditional anti-semitism in new
and contradictory guises. (The term “anti-semitism” is a product of this era, coined
by the German Wilhelm Marr in 1879.) On one hand, Jews were viewed as enemies
of modernity. Cloistered in the cultural isolation of ghettos (to which previous
generations had consigned them), they could never be truly part of the nation-state,
which was rapidly emerging as the fulcrum of modern identity.
9
On the other hand,
for sectors suspicious of or threatened by modernity, Jews were seen as dangerous
agents of modernity: as key players in oppressive economic institutions; as urban,
cosmopolitan, transcultural elements who threatened the unity and identity of the
Völk (people).
It would be erroneous, however, to present European history as one long campaign
of discrimination and repression against Jews. For several centuries Jews in Eastern
Europe “enjoyed a period of comparative peace, tranquillity and the flowering of
Jewish religious life.”
10
They were even more prominent, and valued, in Muslim
Spain. Moreover, modern ideologies of nationalism sometimes followed the liberal
“melting-pot” motif exemplified by the United States. Those Jews who sought
integration with their wider societies could be accepted. The late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries are seen as something of a golden age for Jews in France, Britain,
and Germany, even while some two-and-a-half million Jews were fleeing tsarist Russia
in the face of brutal pogroms.
THE JEWISH HOLOCAUST
148
Germany was widely viewed as one of the more tolerant European societies;
Prussia, the first German state to grant citizenship to its Jews, had done so as early
as 1812. How, then, could Germany turn first to persecuting, then to slaughtering,
nearly two-thirds of the Jews of Europe? Part of the answer lies in the fact that,
although German society was in many ways tolerant and progressive, German politics
was never liberal or democratic, in the manner of both Britain and France.
11
Moreover, German society was deeply destabilized by defeat in the First World War,
and by the imposition of a ruinous and humiliating peace settlement at Versailles in
1919. Germany was forced to shoulder full blame for the outbreak of the “Great War.”
It lost its overseas colonies, along with some of its European territories; its armed
forces were reduced to a fraction of their former size; and onerous reparations were
demanded. “A tidal wave of shame and resentment, experienced even by younger men
who had not seen military service, swept the nation,” writes Richard Plant. “Many
people tried to digest the bitter defeat by searching furiously for scapegoats.”
12
Such
dark currents ran beneath the political order, the Weimar Republic, that prevailed
after the war. Democratic but fragile, it presided over economic chaos – first the
hyperinflation of 1923, which saw the German mark slip to 4.2 trillion to the dollar,
and then the widespread unemployment of the global Great Depression beginning
in 1929.
The result was political extremism. Its prime architect and beneficiary was the
NSDAP (abbreviated to “Nazi”) party, founded by Adolf Hitler and sundry alienated
colleagues. Hitler, a highly decorated First World War veteran and failed artist from
Vienna, assumed the task of resurrecting Germany and imposing its hegemony on
all Europe. This vision would lead to the deaths of tens of millions of people. But it
was underpinned in Hitler’s mind by an epic hatred of Jews – “these black parasites
of the nation,” as he called them in his prison-penned tirade, Mein Kampf (My
Struggle).
13
Hitler’s path to power was far from direct. By 1932, Hitler seemed to many to have
passed his peak. The Nazis won only a minority of parliamentary seats in that year’s
elections; more Germans voted for parties of the Left than of the Right. But divisions
between the Socialists and Communists made the Nazis the largest single party in
the Reichstag, and allowed Hitler to become Chancellor in January 1933.
Once installed in power, the Nazis proved unstoppable. Within three months,
they had seized “total control of [the] German state, abolishing its federalist struc-
ture, dismantling democratic government and outlawing political parties and trade
unions.” The Enabling Act of March 23, 1933 gave Hitler “carte blanche to terrorize
and neutralise all effective political opposition.”
14
Immediately thereafter, the Nazis’
persecutory stance towards Jews became plain. Within a few months, Jews saw their
businesses placed under Nazi boycott; their mass dismissal from hospitals, the schools,
and the civil service, and public book-burnings of Jewish and other “degenerate”
works. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 stripped Jews of citizenship and gave legal shape
to the Nazis’ race-based theories: intermarriage or sexual intercourse between non-
Jews and Jews was prohibited.
With the Nuremberg edicts, and the threat of worse measures looming, increasing
numbers of Jews fled abroad. The abandonment of homes and capital in Germany
meant penury abroad – the Nazis would allow only a fraction of one’s wealth to be
THE JEWISH HOLOCAUST
149
exported. The general unwillingness of the outside world to accept Jewish refugees
meant that many more Jews longed to leave than actually could. Hundreds of those
who remained behind committed suicide as the humiliation of Nazi rule imposed
upon them a “social death.”
15
The persecution mounted further with the Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass)
on November 9–10, 1938, “a proto-genocidal assault”
16
that targeted Jewish
properties, residences, and persons. Several dozen Jews were killed outright, billions
of deutschmarks in damage was inflicted, and some 30,000 male Jews were rounded
up and imprisoned in concentration camps.
17
Now applications to flee increased
dramatically, but this occurred just as Hitler was driving Europe towards crisis and
world war, and as Western countries all but closed their frontiers to Jewish would-
be emigrants.
“Ordinary Germans” and the Nazis
In recent years a great deal of scholarly energy has been devoted to Hitler’s and the
Nazis’ evolving relationship with the German public. Two broad conclusions may
be drawn from the work of Robert Gellately and David Bankier – and also from one
of the most revelatory personal documents of the Nazi era, the diaries of Victor
Klemperer (1881–1960). (Klemperer was a Jew from the German city of Dresden
who survived the entire Nazi era, albeit under conditions of privation and perse-
cution, thanks to his marriage to an “Aryan” woman.)
The first insight is that Nazi rule, and the isolation of the Jews for eventual
expulsion and extermination, counted on a broad well-spring of popular support.
This was based on Hitler’s pledge to return Germany to social order, economic
stability, and world-power status. The basic thesis of Gellately’s book, Backing Hitler:
Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany, is that “Hitler was largely successful in getting
the backing, one way or another, of the great majority of citizens.” Moreover, this
was based on the anathematizing of whole classes of citizens: “the Germans generally
turned out to be proud and pleased that Hitler and his henchmen were putting away
certain kinds of people who did not fit in, or who were regarded as ‘outsiders,’
‘asocials,’ ‘useless eaters,’ or ‘criminals.’”
18
Victor Klemperer’s diaries provide an “extraordinarily acute analysis of the day-
to-day workings of German life under Hitler” and “a singular chronicle of German
society’s progressive Nazification.”
19
Klemperer oscillated between a conviction that
German society had become thoroughly Nazified, and the ironic conviction (given
his expulsion from the body politic) that the soul of the Germany he loved would
triumph. “I certainly no longer believe that [the Nazi regime] has enemies inside
Germany,” he wrote in May 1936. “The majority of the people is content, a small
group accepts Hitler as the lesser evil, no one really wants to be rid of him....And
all are afraid for their livelihood, their life, all are such terrible cowards.” But as late
as March 1940, with the Second World War well underway, “I often ask myself where
all the wild anti-Semitism is. For my part I encounter much sympathy, people help
me out, but fearfully of course.” He noted numerous examples of verbal contempt,
but also a surprising number of cases where colleagues and acquaintances went out
THE JEWISH HOLOCAUST
150
of their way to greet him warmly, and even police officers who accorded him
treatment that was “very courteous, almost comically courteous.” “Every Jew has his
Aryan angel,” one of his fellow inmates in an overcrowded communal house told
him in 1941. But by then Klemperer had been stripped of his job, pension, house,
and typewriter; he would shortly lose his right to indulge even in his cherished ciga-
rettes. In September 1941, he was forced to put on a yellow Star of David identifying
him as a Jew. It left him feeling “shattered”: nearly a year later, he would describe
the star as “torture – I can resolve a hundred times to pay no attention, it remains
torture.”
20
Hundreds of miles to the East, the program of mass killing was gearing
up, as Klemperer was increasingly aware.
If Klemperer and other Jews were the prime target of this demonization and
marginalization of social groups, they were not the only focus, and for some years
they were not necessarily the principal one. Communists (depicted as closely linked
to Jewry) and other political opponents, handicapped and senile Germans, homo-
sexuals, Roma (Gypsies), Polish intellectuals, vagrants, and other “asocial” elements
all occupied the attention of the Nazi authorities during this period, and were often
the victims of “notorious achievements in human destruction” that exceeded the
persecution of the Jews until 1941.
21
Of these groups, political opponents (especially
communists) and the handicapped and senile were most at risk of extreme physical
violence, torture, and murder. “The political and syndical [trade union] left,” wrote
Arno Mayer, “remained the principal target of brutal repression well past the time
of the definitive consolidation of the new regime in July–August 1934.”
22
In the
slaughter of the handicapped, meanwhile, the Nazis first “discovered that it was
possible to murder multitudes,” and that “they could easily recruit men and women
to do the killings.”
23
(See Box 6a for more on the fate of political oppositionists and
the handicapped under Nazi rule.)
■
THE TURN TO MASS MURDER
Here I am, then, on the bottom. One learns quickly enough to wipe out the past and
the future when one is forced to. A fortnight after my arrival [at Auschwitz] I already
had the prescribed hunger, that chronic hunger unknown to free men, which makes
one dream at night, and settles in all the limbs of one’s body. ...I push wagons,
I work with a shovel, I turn rotten in the rain, I shiver in the wind; already my own
body is no longer mine: my belly is swollen, my limbs emaciated, my face is thick in
the morning, hollow in the evening; some of us have yellow skin, others grey. When
we do not meet for a few days we hardly recognize each other.
Primo Levi, Auschwitz survivor
Between the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939 and the onset
of full-scale extermination in mid-1941, the Nazis were busy consolidating and
confining the Jews under their control. The core policy in the occupied territories
of the East was ghettoization: confinement of Jews in festering, overcrowded zones
of major cities. One can make a solid argument that with ghettoization came clear
genocidal intent: “The Nazis sought to create inhuman conditions in the ghettos,
THE JEWISH HOLOCAUST
151
where a combination of obscene overcrowding, deliberate starvation...and
outbreaks of typhus and cholera would reduce Jewish numbers through ‘natural
wastage.’”
24
Certainly, the hundreds of thousands of Jews who died in the ghettos
are counted as victims of the Holocaust.
In the months following the German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22,
1941, some 1.2 million Jews were rounded up and murdered, mostly by point-blank
rifle fire. The direct genocidal agents were the so-called Einsatzgruppen, four death-
squad battalions – some 3,000 men in all – who followed behind the regular German
army.
25
They were joined by other formations, such as the notorious Reserve Police
Battalion 101 studied by historian Christopher Browning and political scientist
Daniel Goldhagen.
The role of the regular German army, or Wehrmacht, in this eruption of full-scale
genocide received attention at the Nuremberg trials of 1945–46 (see Chapter 15).
However, in part because the Western allies preferred to see the Wehrmacht as
gentlemanly opponents, and subsequently because the German army was being
reconstructed as an ally by both sides in the Cold War, a myth was cultivated that
the Wehrmacht had acted “honorably” in the occupied territories. Scholarly inquiry
has now demonstrated that this is “a wholly false picture of the historical reality.”
26
Permeated to the core by the Nazis’ racist ideology, the Wehrmacht was key to
engineering the mass murder of 3.3 million Soviets seized as prisoners-of-war (see Box
6a).
27
The Wehrmacht was also central to the perpetration of the Jewish Holocaust.
The Einsatzgruppen, writes Hannah Arendt, “needed and got the close cooperation
of the Armed Forces; indeed, relations between them were usually ‘excellent’ and in
some instances ‘affectionate’ (herzlich, literally ‘heartfelt’). The generals . . . often lent
their own men, ordinary soldiers, to assist in the massacres.”
28
A great many ordinary
soldiers “delighted in death as spectators or as perpetrators.”
29
As SS Lieutenant-
Colonel Karl Kretschmer wrote home in September 1942: “Here in Russia, wherever
the German soldier is, no Jew remains.”
30
Even such massive slaughter could not hope to eliminate European Jewry in
a “reasonable” time. Moreover, the intensely intimate character of murder by
gunfire, with human tissue and brain matter spattering onto the clothes and
faces of the German killers, began to take a psychological toll. The difficulty was
especially pronounced in the case of mass murders of children and women. While
it was relatively easy for the executioners to persuade themselves that adult male
victims, even unarmed civilians, were dangerous and deserved their cruel fate, the
argument was harder to make for people traditionally viewed as passive, dependent,
or helpless.
31
To reduce this stress, and to increase the logistical efficiency of the killing,
the industrialized “death camp” with its gas chambers came to the fore. Both were
refinements of existing institutions and technologies. The death camps grew out of
the concentration-camp system the Nazis had established upon first taking power
in 1933, while killings by gas had first been employed in 1939 as part of the “euthana-
sia” campaign that was such a vital forerunner of genocide against the Jews. (It was
wound down, in fact, at the precise point that the campaign against European Jews
turned to root-and-branch extermination.) Gas chambers allowed for the desired
psychological distance between the killers and their victims.
THE JEWISH HOLOCAUST
152
Principally by this means, one-and-a-quarter million Jews were killed at Auschwitz
– actually a complex of three camps, of which Auschwitz II (Birkenau) operated as
the killing center. Zyklon B (cyanide gas in crystal form) was overwhelmingly the
means of murder at Auschwitz. Nearly two million more Jews died by varied means
including gas, shootings, beatings, and starvation at the other “death camps” in
occupied Poland, distinguished from the vastly larger Nazi network of concentration
camps by their core function of extermination. These were Chelmno (where 200,000
Jews were slaughtered); Sobibor (260,000); Belzec (500,000); Treblinka (800,000,
mostly from the Polish capital Warsaw); and Majdanek (130,000).
32
THE JEWISH HOLOCAUST
153
Figure 6.1 The ruins of the
undressing room adjacent to
the gas chamber and
crematorium complex known
as Krema II, at the Auschwitz-
Birkenau death camp in
western Poland, dynamited by
the Nazis in the closing stages
of the Second World War.
Jews and other victims were
told they would be taking
showers; instead, they were
asphyxiated with cyanide gas,
and their bodies incinerated in
the crematorium complex at
the rear of the photo.
Source: Courtesy Dr. Michael
Shermer.
It would be misleading to distinguish too sharply between the “death camps” where
gas was the normal means of extermination, and the broader network of camps in
which killings of Jews also reached exterminatory levels. As Daniel Goldhagen has
argued, “after the beginning of 1942, the camp system in general was lethal for Jews,”
and well over a million died outside the death camps, killed by starvation, disease, and
overwork.
33
Perhaps 500,000 more, in Raul Hilberg’s estimate, succumbed in the
Jewish ghettos, themselves a kind of concentration camp. Finally, tens of thousands
died on the brutal and nonsensical forced marches of camp inmates as Allied forces
closed in.
34
Notoriously, the extermination system continued to function even when it
impeded the war effort. In March 1944, the Nazis intervened to occupy Hungary
as a bulwark against advancing Soviet forces. Adolf Eichmann promptly arrived to
supervise the rounding up for slaughter of the country’s Jews. Thousands were saved
by the imaginative intervention of Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg (see Chapter
10). But some 400,000 were packed off to be gassed at Auschwitz-Birkenau and
other death camps – despite the enormous strain this imposed on the rail system
and the Nazis’ dwindling human and material resources. It often seemed that the
single-minded devotion to genocidal destruction outweighed even the Nazis’ desire
for self-preservation.
THE JEWISH HOLOCAUST
154
Figure 6.2 Mass burial of prisoners’ corpses in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp following liberation, May 1945.
Source: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
THE JEWISH HOLOCAUST
155
BOX 6.1 ONE WOMAN’S STORY: NECHAMA EPSTEIN
Nechama Epstein was a Polish Jew from Warsaw who was just 18 years old when
she “and her family were herded into the city’s ghetto together with 350,000 other
Jews.”
35
One of the few survivors of the Auschwitz death camp, she was interviewed
after the war by David P. Boder, an American psychologist who published a book
titled I Did Not Interview the Dead. However, Boder chose not to include his
conversation with Epstein; her testimony did not see the light of day until it was
excerpted in Donald Niewyk’s chapter for the powerful anthology, Century of
Genocide. Her account, Niewyk noted, “reveals a remarkable breadth of experiences,
including survival in ghettos, slave labor camps, and extermination centers.”
36
Epstein described the grim privations of life in the Warsaw ghetto – the very ghetto
that would rise up so heroically against the Germans in mid-1944, and be crushed.
“It was very bad,” she remembered. “We had nothing to sell any more. Eight people
were living on a kilo of beets a day. . . . We did not have any more strength to walk.
. . . Every day there were other dead, small children, bigger children, older people.
All died of a hunger death.”
Epstein was caught up in the mass round-up of Jews to be shipped to the exter-
mination center at Treblinka in September 1942. Packed into a single cattle-car with
200 other Jews, she passed an entire night before the train began to move: “We
lay one on top of the other....One lay suffocating on top of another. . . . We could
do nothing to help ourselves. And then real death began.” Tormented by thirst and
near-asphyxiation, Jews struggled with each other for a snatch of air or any moisture.
“Mothers were giving the children urine to drink.”
Some enterprising prisoners managed to saw a hole in the cattle-car, and Epstein,
among others, leapt out. With the help of a Polish militia member, she found her
way to the Miedryrzec ghetto, where she passed the next eight months. “Every four
weeks there were new deportations.” The first of these she survived by hiding in an
attic and eating raw beets. “I did not have anything to drink. The first snow fell then,
so I made a hole in the roof and pulled in the hand a little snow. And this I licked.
And this I lived on.”
Her luck ran out at the time of the last deportation. She was led away, to a transport
and apparently her doom, on “a beautiful summer day” in 1943. This time the
destination was Majdanek, another of the extermination centers in occupied Poland.
There, “We were all lined up. There were many who were shot [outright]....The
mothers were put separately, the children separately, the men separately, the women
separately. . . . The children and the mothers were led to the crematory. All were
burned....We never laid eyes on them again.”
continued
THE JEWISH HOLOCAUST
156
She spent two months at Majdanek. “I lived through many terrible things. We had
nothing to eat. We were so starved....The food consisted of two hundred grams
of bread a day, and a little soup of water with nettles.” A German SS woman entered
the barracks every day “at six in the morning...beating everybody.”
In July 1943, Epstein was shipped off to Auschwitz. By good fortune, she was
consigned to a work camp rather than to immediate extermination in the Birkenau
gas chambers. “We worked carrying stones on barrows, large stones. To eat they
did not give us. We were beaten terribly” by German women guards: “They said
that every day they must kill three, four Jews.” She fell sick, and survived her time
in the hospital only by hiding from the regular round-ups that carted off ill inmates
to the crematoria. “Christian women were lying there, so I climbed over to the
Christians, into their beds, and there I always had the good fortune to hide.”
In October, the entire sick-ward was emptied. “There was a girl eighteen years old,
and she was crying terribly. She said that she is still so young, she wants to live.
. . . [But] nothing helped. They were all taken away.” When she emerged from the
ward, she saw the Auschwitz crematory burning in the night: “We saw the entire
sky red [from] the glow of the fire. Blood was pouring on the sky.” But Epstein again
survived the selection for the Birkenau extermination center. She was sent back to
Majdanek, where she witnessed SS and Gestapo killers forcing male inmates to dig
mass graves, then lining up hundreds of female inmates to be shot. Over the course
of a further eight months at Majdanek, she remained among the handful of inmates
– several hundred only – who were spared gassing and cremation.
Epstein was eventually sent to a forced-labor center: Plaszow, near Krakow (the same
camp featured in Steven Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List). By late 1944, the Soviets
were approaching Plaszow. “We were again dragged away. I was the second time
taken to Auschwitz.” After that, she was dispatched to Bergen-Belsen; then to
Aschersleben in Germany proper, where she labored alongside Dutch, Yugoslav, and
French prisoners-of-war.
American forces were now closing in from the West. Epstein was conscripted into a
death march alongside 500 other inmates. “Only women. Two hundred fell en
route.” At last, after a march of more than 250 kilometres, she reached Theresienstadt
in Czechoslovakia. This had long served as a “model” detention facility for the Nazis
– the only one to which Red Cross representatives were admitted. “We were
completely in tatters. . . . We were very dirty. . . . We were badly treated. We were
beaten. They screamed at us. ‘Accursed swine! You are filthy. What sort of people
are you?’” Epstein and her fellow inmates now looked like the “subhumans” the
Germans had been indoctrinated to expect.
On the very last day of the European war, May 8, 1945, Theresienstadt was liberated
by Russian forces. “We didn’t believe it....We went out, whoever was able. . . .
We went out with great joy, with much crying. . . .
■
DEBATING THE HOLOCAUST
Many of the central themes of the Nazis’ attempted destruction of European Jews
have served as touchstones for the broader field of comparative genocide studies.
No other genocide has generated remotely as much literature as the Jewish Holocaust,
including thousands of books and essays. It is important, therefore, to explore some
major points of debate, not only for the insights they give into the events described
in this chapter, but for their relevance to genocide studies as a whole.
Intentionalists vs. functionalists
The core of the debate over the past two decades has revolved around a scholarly
tendency generally termed “intentionalist,” and a contrasting “functionalist” inter-
pretation. Intentionalists, as the tag suggests, place primary emphasis on the intention
of the Nazis, from the outset, to eliminate European Jews by means that eventually
included mass slaughter. Such an approach tends to emphasize the figure of Adolf
Hitler and his monomaniacal zeal to eliminate the Jewish “cancer” from Germany
and Europe. (“Once I really am in power,” Hitler had told a journalist as far back as
1922, “my first and foremost task will be the annihilation of the Jews.”)
37
Necessary
as well was the anti-semitic dimension of both Nazi ideology and European history.
This fueled the Nazis’ animus against the Jews, and also ensured there would be no
shortage of “willing executioners” to do the dirty work.
The functionalist critique, on the other hand, downplays the significance of Hitler
as an individual. It “depicts the fragmentation of decision-making and the blur-
ring of political responsibility,” and emphasizes “the disintegration of traditional
bureaucracy into a crooked maze of ill-conceived and uncoordinated task forces,” in
Colin Tatz’s summary.
38
Also stressed is the evolutionary and contingent character
of the campaign against the Jews: from legal discrimination, to concentration, to
mass murder. In this view, “what happened in Nazi Germany [was] an unplanned
‘cumulative radicalization’ produced by the chaotic decision-making process of a
polycratic regime and the ‘negative selection’ of destructive elements from the Nazis’
ideological arsenal as the only ones that could perpetually mobilize the disparate and
otherwise incompatible elements of the Nazi coalition.”
39
THE JEWISH HOLOCAUST
157
“But now there began a real death. People who had been starved for so many years.
. . . The Russians had opened all the German storehouses, all the German stores,
and they said, ‘Take whatever you want.’ People who had been badly starved, they
shouldn’t have eaten....And the people began to eat, to eat too much, greedily.
. . . Hundreds of people fell a day....People crawled over the dead.” Typhus broke
out. But Epstein survived. She returned to Warsaw, married, and emigrated to
Palestine.
This sometimes acrimonious debate gave way, in the 1990s, to a growing
recognition that the intentionalist and functionalist strands are not irreconcilable.
“Both positions in the debate have a number of merits and demerits; both ultimately
reflect different forms of historical explanation; and the ground between them is
steadily narrowing in favour of a consensus which borrows elements from both lines
of argument.”
40
The raw material for Nazi genocide was present from the start, but
required a host of historically contingent features to actualize and maximize it.
Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman propose the term “intentional functionalism”
to capture this interplay of actors and variables.
41
Jewish resistance
The depiction of Jews as having gone meekly to their deaths was first advanced
by Raul Hilberg in his massive 1961 treatise The Destruction of the European Jews,
and then enshrined by Hannah Arendt in her controversial account of Eichmann in
Jerusalem. Both Hilberg and Arendt noted the close pre-war coordination between
the Jewish Agency (which sought to promote Jewish immigration to Palestine) and
the Nazi authorities.
42
They also stressed the role of the Jewish councils (Judenräte),
bodies of Jews delegated by the Nazis to oversee the ghettos, and the round-ups for
“transport” of Jewish civilians. “The whole truth,” as Arendt summarized it, was that
without Jewish leadership and organization, the Jewish people would have suffered
“chaos and plenty of misery” at Nazi hands, “but the total number of victims would
hardly have been between four and a half and six million people.”
43
While it may be true that “the salient characteristic of the Jewish community
in Europe during 1933–1945 was its step-by-step adjustment to step-by-step destruc-
tion,”
44
research has starkly undermined this depiction of Jewish passivity and
complicity. Scholars have described how, under horrific circumstances, Jews found
ways to resist: going into hiding; struggling to preserve Jewish culture and creativity;
and even launching armed uprisings. (The mass escape from the Sobibor death
camp in October 1943, and the Warsaw ghetto uprising of April 1944, are the most
famous of these rebellions against the Nazis.)
45
Large numbers of Jews also joined
the armed forces of the Allies, or fought as partisans behind German lines. On
balance, “it is pure myth that the Jews were merely ‘passive,’” writes Alexander Donat
in his memoir The Holocaust Kingdom:
The Jews fought back against their enemies to a degree no other community
anywhere in the world would have been capable of were it to find itself similarly
beleaguered. They fought against hunger and starvation, against disease, against
a deadly Nazi economic blockade. They fought against murderers and against
traitors within their own ranks, and they were utterly alone in their fight. They
were forsaken by God and by man, surrounded by hatred or indifference. Ours
was not a romantic war. Although there was much heroism, there was little beauty
– much toil and suffering, but no glamour. We fought back on every front where
the enemy attacked – the biological front, the economic front, the propaganda
front, the cultural front – with every weapon we possessed.
46
THE JEWISH HOLOCAUST
158
The Allies and the churches: Could the Jews have been saved?
The genocide against European Jews could have been avoided, argues the historian
Yehuda Bauer, just as the Second World War itself might never have occurred – “had
the Great Powers stopped Nazi Germany when it was still weak.” But at this point,
“nobody knew that a Holocaust was even possible, because nobody knew what a
Holocaust was; the Germans had not decided on anything like it in the 1930s.”
47
The
Allies, haunted by the carnage of the First World War, sought accommodation
(“appeasement”) rather than confrontation.
The Evian Conference of July 1938, held in a French town on Lake Geneva,
brought together representatives of Western countries to address the Jewish plight.
In retrospect, and even at the time, it offered the best chance to alleviate the plight
of German Jews, through the simple expedient of opening up Western borders to
Jewish refugees. But instead, the West ducked its responsibility. In Germany, Hitler
could barely conceal his delight. The rejection of the Jews not only further humiliated
Jews themselves, but pointed out the hypocrisy of the outside world’s humanitarian
rhetoric.
Turning to the period of full-scale genocide against the Jews, it seems clear that
details of the killing operations were known to the Allies early on. For example, radio
communications of the Nazi Order Police, alluding to mass murder, were intercepted.
But the Allies were observing from an insuperable distance, with Germany at the
height of its powers on the European continent. The sheer speed of the slaughter
also militated against meaningful intervention. “From mid-March 1942 to mid-
February 1943,” that is, in less than a year, “over one-half the victims of the Jewish
Holocaust...lost their lives at the hands of Nazi killers.”
48
It may be argued that the inclusion of targets such as Auschwitz’s gas chambers
and crematoria in the Allied bombing campaign, along with key transport points for
Jews, could have disrupted the smooth functioning of the Nazi killing machine. The
case is especially cogent for the latter stages of the war, as with the genocide of the
Hungarian Jews in 1944–45 (when the USSR might also have been able to intervene).
But on pre-war evidence, it is hard to believe that, if more effective military measures
could have been found, the Allies would have placed saving Jews higher on the list
of military priorities – or that doing so would have made much of a difference.
The role of the Christian churches has also been scrutinized and criticized. Pope
Pius XII’s placating of the Nazi regime in Germany, and his silence on the persecution
of the Jews – which included the rounding up and deportation of Roman Jews under
his very nose – are notorious.
49
Within Germany, the churches did virtually nothing
to impede the genocide and a great deal to overlook it, effectively facilitating it.
The Nazis demonstrated at numerous points their keen sensitivity to public opinion,
including religious opinion – protests from German churches were partly responsible
for driving the “euthanasia” campaign underground after 1941 – but these were not
forthcoming from more than a handful of principled religious voices. When it came
to defending co-parishioners whom the Nazis deemed of Jewish origin, “both Church
and Church members drove away from their community, from their churches, people
with whom they were united in worship, as one drives away mangy dogs from one’s
door.”
50
THE JEWISH HOLOCAUST
159
The most successful examples of resistance to Hitler’s genocidal designs for
European Jewry came from a handful of Western and Northern European countries
that were either neutral or under relatively less oppressive occupation regimes. Here,
sometimes, extension of the killing campaign could impose political costs that the
Nazis were not willing to pay. The most vivid display of public opposition swept up
virtually the entire adult population of Denmark, led by the royal family. When the
Nazis decreed the imposition of the Jewish yellow star, everyone adopted it, and the
regulation was rescinded. Subsequently, Danes arranged for the evacuation of the
majority of the country’s Jews to neutral Sweden, where they lived through the rest
of the war (see Chapter 10). Sweden, meanwhile, saved “about half of Norwegian
Jewry and almost all of the Danish Jews,” and in 1944:
involved herself more heavily in the heart of Europe, particularly in Budapest,
where, along with Switzerland, Portugal, and the Vatican, the Swedish legation
issued “protective passports,” established safe houses, and generally attempted to
restrain the German occupants and their Hungarian puppets from killing more
Jews on Hungarian soil in the final hours of the war. Upon the liberation of Jews
in concentration camps in the spring of 1945, Sweden accepted thousands of
victims for medical treatment and rehabilitation.
51
Willing executioners?
Just as scholars have demonstrated increased interest in “micro-histories” of public
opinion under the Nazis, and the role of ordinary German citizens in accepting and
sustaining the regime, so have searching questions been asked about the role of
different sectors of the German population in the genocide. As a result of decades
of research by Raul Hilberg and many others, it is now a truism that not only German
social and economic elites, but all the professions (up to and including the clergy,
as we have seen), were deeply corrupted or compromised by the Nazi state. In
Michael Burleigh’s words, an “understanding of the process of persecution [on racial
grounds] now includes greater awareness of the culpable involvement of various
sections of the professional intelligentsia, such as anthropologists, doctors, econo-
mists, historians, lawyers and psychiatrists, in the formation and implementation of
Nazi policies.”
52
For such figures, “the advent of the Nazi regime was coterminous
with the onset of ‘boom’ conditions. No one asked or compelled these academics
and scientists actively to work on the regime’s behalf. Most of them could have said
no. In fact, the files of the regime’s many agencies bulge with their unsolicited
recommendations.”
53
What of the genocidal participation of ordinary Germans? This subject has
spawned the most vigorous debate in Holocaust studies over the past decade, though
illumination has not always matched the heat generated.
At the heart of the controversy was the publication, in 1992 and 1996 respectively,
of Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final
Solution in Poland, and Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary
Germans and the Holocaust. Both of these scholars examined the same archives on
THE JEWISH HOLOCAUST
160
Reserve Police Battalion 101, which consisted overwhelmingly of Germans drafted
from civilian police units (often too old for regular military service). The archival
records described in detail the battalion’s killings of helpless, naked Jewish civilians
in occupied Poland during 1941–42, and the range of reactions among group
members.
In interpreting the archival record, Browning acknowledged the importance of
“the incessant proclamation of German superiority and incitement of contempt and
hatred for the Jewish enemy.” But he also stressed other factors: “conformity to the
group,” that is, peer pressure; the desire for praise, prestige, and advancement; and
the threat of marginalization and anathematization in highly dangerous wartime
circumstances. He referred to “the mutually intensifying effects of war and racism.
...Nothing helped the Nazis to wage a race war so much as the war itself.”
54
Goldhagen, dismissing Browning’s work, advanced instead a monocausal thesis.
The Jewish Holocaust was the direct outgrowth of “eliminationist” anti-semitism,
which by the twentieth century had become “common sense” for Germans. By 1941,
“ordinary Germans easily became genocidal killers...[and] did so even though they
did not have to.” They “kill[ed] Jews willingly and often eagerly.”
55
With the controversy now cooled, it is easier to appreciate the significance of
“the Goldhagen debate.” Goldhagen did counter a trend towards bloodless analysis
and abstract theorizing in studies of the Jewish catastrophe. In addition, by achieving
mass popularity, Goldhagen’s book, like Samantha Power’s “A Problem From Hell”
(2001), broke down the usual wall between scholarship and public discussion.
However, the core elements of Goldhagen’s thesis – that there was something unique
about German anti-semitism that spawned the Holocaust; that Germans were only
too ready to leap to bloodthirsty murder of Jews – have been undermined. Not only
was anti-semitism historically stronger in countries other than Germany, but the
virulence of its expression during the Second World War in countries such as
Lithuania and Romania exceeded that of Germany. The Nazis, as noted above, were
reluctant to confront “ordinary Germans” with bloody atrocity. Nor could they rely
on a widespread popular desire to inflict cruelty on Jews as the foundational strategy
for implementing their genocide.
Israel and the Jewish Holocaust
It has occasionally happened that an experience of great suffering warrants the
creation or validation of a homeland for the afflicted group, in the form of a nation-
state or quasi-state. Such was the case with East Timor (Box 7a), the world’s newest
nation, born from Indonesian occupation and genocide. The Kurdish protected zone
and de facto state in northern Iraq may also qualify (see Box 4a); but no case is as
dramatic as that of Israel in the wake of the Second World War. The dream of the
decades-old Zionist movement, namely to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine
through political mobilization and mass immigration, became a reality with extra-
ordinary rapidity in the postwar period, as Britain abandoned its territorial mandate
over Palestine, and Arabs and Jews fought over the territory. “Anti-Zionism in the
Jewish community collapsed, and a consensus that Jewry, abandoned during the war,
THE JEWISH HOLOCAUST
161
had to have a home of its own crystallized overnight.”
56
Jewish survivors of Nazi
genocide provided Palestine with a critical mass of Jewish immigrants and, in the
decades following the declaration of the Israeli state on May 15, 1948, Israel received
tens of billions of dollars from the Federal Republic of Germany as reparations for
the mass murder and expropriation inflicted on the Jews.
To a significant degree, successive Israeli governments have relied on the Holocaust
as a touchstone of Jewish experience and national identity. Palestinians and their
supporters, for their part, have tended to adopt the genocide framework as well, but
in order to draw attention to the Palestinian plight at Israeli hands. They have sought
to draw parallels between Israeli repressive policies and those of their Nazi forebears.
Often such comparisons seem hysterical and/or counterproductive; but sometimes
they have resonated. Notable was the free passage granted by Israeli forces to Christian
Phalangist militia in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, during the
Israelis’ 1982 invasion of Lebanon. This led predictably to the genocidal massacre
of thousands of defenseless Palestinians, as Israeli troops stood passively by.
Is the Jewish Holocaust “uniquely unique”?
Few historical and philosophical questions have generated such intense scholarly
debate in genocide studies as this one. On one level, it is clearly facile. As Alex Alvarez
puts it: “All genocides are simultaneously unique and analogous.”
57
The question is
whether the Jewish Holocaust is sui generis – that is, “uniquely unique.”
58
In genocide studies, a well-known exponent of the uniqueness thesis is Steven
Katz, who devoted his immense tome The Holocaust in Historical Context, Vol. 1
to arguing that the Jewish Holocaust was “phenomenologically unique by virtue
of the fact that never before has a state set out, as a matter of intentional principle
and actualized policy, to annihilate physically every man, woman, and child belong-
ing to a specific people.”
59
The Nazi campaign against the Jews was the only true
genocide, as Katz defined the term (see p. 18; recall that my own preferred definition
of genocide reworks Katz’s).
Many other scholars have argued against the uniqueness hypothesis. “I object very
strongly,” wrote Israel Charny, “to the efforts to name the genocide of any one people
as the single, ultimate event, or as the most important event against which all other
tragedies of genocidal mass death are to be tested and found wanting.”
60
Phillip
Lopate has likewise argued that claims of uniqueness tend to bestow “a sort of
privileged nation status in the moral honor roll.”
61
This claim of privilege then carries
over to “the Jewish state,” Israel, helping to blunt criticism of its treatment of the
Palestinians.
62
My own view should be clearly stated: the Jewish Holocaust was not “uniquely
unique.” On no analytical dimension – speed, scale, scope, intensity, efficiency,
cruelty, ideology – does it stand alone and apart. If it is unique in its mix of these
ingredients, so too are most of the other major instances of mass killing in their own
way. I also believe that uniqueness proponents, like the rest of us, were severely shaken
by the holocaust in Rwanda in 1994 (see Chapter 9). The killing there proceeded
much faster than the slaughter of the Jews; killed a higher proportion of the
THE JEWISH HOLOCAUST
162
designated victim group (some 80 percent of Rwandan Tutsis versus two-thirds of
European Jews); was carried out by “a chillingly effective organizational structure that
would implement the political plan of genocide more efficiently than was achieved
by the industrialized death camps in Nazi Germany”;
63
and – unlike the Jewish
catastrophe – featured intensive participation in killing duties by the mass of the
general population. Was Rwanda, then, “uniquely unique”? The claim seems at least
as tenable as in the case of the Jewish Holocaust – but in both cases, a nuanced
comparative framework is preferable.
64
The Jews were unique as a target of the Nazis. “In the end,” writes Raul Hilberg,
“. . . the Jews retained their special place.”
65
According to Omer Bartov,
It was only in the case of the Jews that there was a determination to seek out every
baby hidden in a haystack, every family living in a bunker in the forest, every
woman trying to pass herself off as a Gentile. It was only in the case of the Jews
that vast factories were constructed and managed with the sole purpose of killing
trainload after trainload of people. It was only in the case of the Jews that huge,
open-air, public massacres of tens of thousands of people were conducted on a daily
basis throughout Eastern Europe.
66
Lastly, the Jewish Holocaust holds a unique place in genocide studies. Among all the
world’s genocides, it alone produced a scholarly literature that spawned, in turn, a
comparative discipline. Specialists on the subject were also central in constituting
the field and its core institutions, such as the International Association of Genocide
Scholars (IAGS) and the Journal of Genocide Research: “Genocide studies is really the
outgrowth of the study of the Holocaust,” as Thomas Cushman has noted.
67
■
FURTHER STUDY
Note: No genocide has generated remotely as much scholarly attention as the Nazis’
against the Jews. The following is a bare sampling of core works in English; others
are cited in subsequent chapters.
Götz Aly, “Final Solution”: Nazi Population Policy and the Murder of the European
Jews. London: Arnold, 1999. Aly’s “functionalist” argument emphasizes the role
of Nazi bureaucrats confronted with problems of population management in the
occupied territories.
Omer Bartov, ed., The Holocaust: Origins, Implementation, Aftermath: Rewriting
Histories. London: Routledge, 2000. Excellent anthology of writings by many
leading scholars.
Omer Bartov, Germany’s War and the Holocaust: Disputed Histories. Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 2003. Powerful essays by the principal scholar of the
Wehrmacht’s war on the eastern front; see also Hitler’s Army.
Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final
Solution in Poland. New York: Perennial, 1993. Based on some of the same
archival sources as Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners (see below), but
emphasizes group dynamics in addition to anti-semitism.
THE JEWISH HOLOCAUST
163
Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann, The Racial State: Germany 1933–
1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. How Nazi racial ideology
inspired genocidal policy.
Alexander Donat, The Holocaust Kingdom. New York: Holocaust Library, 1978.
Classic memoir of ghetto and death camp, sensitively told and translated.
Henry Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final
Solution. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. Traces the
evolution of the Nazi killing machine from the initial targeting of disabled and
handicapped Germans to the mass slaughter of Jews and Roma.
Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, Volume I: The Years of Persecution,
1933–1939. New York: HarperCollins, 1997. Innovative, highly readable
account of the years preceding the onset of full-fledged genocide.
Robert Gellately, Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2001. Argues that ordinary Germans generally
supported Nazi policies, often exhibiting enthusiasm beyond the call of duty.
Daniel J. Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the
Holocaust. New York: Vintage, 1997. Controversial book ascribing a monocausal
explanation for the genocide, rooted in Germans’ visceral hatred of the Jews.
Richard Grunberger, A Social History of the Third Reich. London: Penguin, 1974.
Encyclopedic overview of Nazism’s social impact.
Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (3rd edn), 3 vols. New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 2003. Massive, meticulous study of the bureaucracy
of death.
Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (My Struggle), trans. Ralph Mannheim. Boston, MA:
Houghton Mifflin, 1943. First published in 1925–26; lays out Hitler’s vision of
German destiny, as well as his virulent hatred of the Jews.
Ian Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation (4th
edn). London: Arnold, 2000. Classic overview of, and contribution to, scholarly
debates about the nature of the Nazi regime.
Victor Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years, 2 vols. New York:
Modern Library, 1999, 2001. One of the essential documents of the twentieth
century: the testimony of a German Jew who lived through the entire Nazi era.
Ronnie S. Landau, The Nazi Holocaust. Chicago, IL: Ivan R. Dee, 1994. A good
overview of the origins and course of the Jewish catastrophe.
Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz. New York: Touchstone, 1996. Haunting account
of a year and a half in the Nazi death camp; see also The Drowned and the Saved.
Alan S. Rosenbaum, ed., Is the Holocaust Unique? Perspectives on Comparative
Genocide (2nd edn). Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000. Wide-ranging and
controversial examination of the “uniqueness” thesis.
Ron Rosenbaum, Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil.NewYork:
Perennial, 1999. Quest for the essence of the malignancy that was Hitler.
John Weiss, Ideology of Death: Why the Holocaust Happened in Germany. Chicago, IL:
Ivan R. Dee, 1996. Why did only Germany, among anti-semitic European
societies, produce a full-scale genocide against the Jews?
THE JEWISH HOLOCAUST
164
■
NOTES
1 In religious usage, a “holocaust” is “a sacrificial offering wholly consumed by fire in
exaltation of God” (Arno J. Mayer, Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? The “Final
Solution” in History [New York: Pantheon, 1988], p. 16). However, in the twentieth
century, this was supplanted by a secular usage, in which “holocaust” designates “a wide
variety of conflagrations, massacres, wars, and disasters.” See Jon Petrie’s fascinating
etymological study, “The Secular Word HOLOCAUST: Scholarly Myths, History, and
20th Century Meanings,” Journal of Genocide Research, 2: 1 (2000), pp. 31–64.
2 Donald L. Niewyk, “Holocaust: The Jews,” in Samuel L. Totten et al., eds, Century of
Genocide: Eyewitness Accounts and Critical Views (New York: Garland Publishing, 1997),
p. 136. The figure of 5.1 to 5.4 million killed is used by the US Holocaust Museum; see
Peter Balakian, The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response (New
York: HarperCollins, 2003), p. 195.
3 Statistics cited in Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman, Denying History: Who Says
the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It? (Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 2002), p. 174.
4 Yehuda Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001),
p. xi.
5 Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the
Holocaust (New York: Vintage, 1997), pp. 37–38. For a detailed study of the progressive
demonization of the Jews, see Steven T. Katz, “Medieval Antisemitism: The Process of
Mythification,” ch. 6 in Katz, The Holocaust in Historical Context, Vol. 1: The Holocaust
and Mass Death before the Modern Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994),
pp. 225–316. However, as Mark Levene has pointed out to me, there was also a sense in
which medieval Christianity needed the Jews – “for its own Christological endtime” and
teleological myth. It may thus have been constrained from launching a full-scale genocidal
assault on them. Levene, personal communication, August 26, 2005.
6 Colin Tatz, With Intent to Destroy: Reflecting on Genocide (London: Verso, 2003),
p. 44.
7 Luther quoted in Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (3rd edn), Vol. 1
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 13.
8 The most infamous anti-semitic tract of modern times is the Protocols of the Elders of Zion
(1903), a pamphlet that is now generally held to have been devised by the Tsar’s secret
police in pre-revolutionary Russia, but which purported to represent the ambitions and
deliberations of a global Jewish conspiracy against Christian civilization. For the complete
text of the Protocols, and a point-by-point refutation, see Steven Leonard Jacobs and Mark
Weitzman, Dismantling the Big Lie: the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (Jersey City, NJ:
Ktav Publishing House, 2003 – nb: the centenary of the Protocols).
9 In addition, for exponents of biological anti-semitism (a nineteenth-century invention),
Jews came to be viewed as innately at odds with Western-Christian civilization. Religious
conversion could no longer expunge their Jewishness – which helps explain why this
option was denied to Jews under Nazi rule. My thanks to Benjamin Madley for this point.
10 Ronnie S. Landau, The Nazi Holocaust (Chicago, IL: Ivan R. Dee, 1994), p. 44.
11 In the case of France, strong arguments have been made that anti-semitism was far more
widespread and virulent, in elite and popular opinion, than was true in Germany. But
“in France – unlike Germany – whatever the strength of antisemitic feeling on the streets,
in the bars and in the universities, political power always remained in the hands of the
liberal republicans, a government which never endorsed political antisemitism” (Landau,
The Nazi Holocaust, p. 63). However, when dictatorial government and “eliminationist
anti-semitism” (Goldhagen’s term) were imposed in France from 1940 to 1944 – under
direct Nazi occupation and under the Vichy puppet regime – the authorities and a key
section of the population cooperated enthusiastically in the transport for mass execution
of the Jews.
THE JEWISH HOLOCAUST
165
12 Richard Plant, The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War against Homosexuals (New York: Owl
Books, 1988), p. 23.
13 Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (My Struggle), trans. Ralph Mannheim (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1943), p. 562.
14 Landau, The Nazi Holocaust, pp. 317, 122.
15 See Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), and the discussion in Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing
Executioners, pp. 168–70.
16 Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, p. 141.
17 For an excellent short analysis of the Kristallnacht, see Leonidas E. Hill, “The Pogrom
of November 9–10, 1938 in Germany,” in Paul R. Brass, ed., Riots and Pogroms
(Washington Square, NY: New York University Press, 1996), pp. 89–113.
18 Robert Gellately, Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2001), p. vii.
19 Omer Bartov, Germany’s War and the Holocaust: Disputed Histories (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 2003), p. 197.
20 Victor Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness 1933–1941 (New York: The Modern Library,
1999), pp. 165, 329–30, 393, 422, 429; Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness 1942–1945
(New York: The Modern Library, 2001), pp. 66, 71.
21 Christopher R. Browning, The Path to Genocide: Essays on Launching the Final Solution
(Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. ix.
22 Mayer, Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?, pp. 114, 116–17.
23 Michael Burleigh, “Psychiatry, German Society and the Nazi ‘Euthanasia’ Programme,”
in Omer Bartov, ed., The Holocaust: Origins, Implementation, Aftermath (London:
Routledge, 2000), p. 70.
24 Landau, The Nazi Holocaust, pp. 154–55. In his memoir of the Warsaw ghetto, Alexander
Donat gives a figure for half a million ghetto internees as “27,000 apartments in an area
of 750 acres, with six or seven persons to a room” (Donat, The Holocaust Kingdom
[Washington, DC: Holocaust Library, 1999], p. 24). A famous portrait of life in the
Warsaw ghetto in 1941, conveying the hardship and horror of ghetto life, is provided by
the photographs taken by a German army officer, Heinrich Jost. See Gunther Schwarberg,
In the Ghetto of Warsaw: Photographs by Heinrich Jost (Göttingen: Steidl Publishing,
2001).
25 See Richard Rhodes, Masters of Death: The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the
Holocaust (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002).
26 Bartov, Germany’s War and the Holocaust, p. 14. See also the excellent two-part essay by
Wolfgang Weber, “The Debate in Germany over the Crimes of Hitler’s Wehrmacht,”
World Socialist Web Site, September 19–20, 2001, http://www.wsws.org/articles/2001/
sep2001/wehr-s19.shtml and http://www.wsws.org/articles/2001/sep2001/wehr-s20.
shtml.
27 A key “tipping point” for the Wehrmacht’s “indiscriminate, systematic and wholesale
resort to carnage” was the Commissar Order issued on June 6, 1941, which called for
“Communist Party functionaries...to be identified...and murdered by the army
either on the spot or in rear areas.” “Effectively,” notes Michael Burleigh, “the army was
assuming the functions hitherto performed by the Einsatzgruppen, namely the killing of
an entire group of people solely by virtue of their membership of that group and without
formal process.” Burleigh, Ethics and Extermination: Reflections on Nazi Genocide
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 67.
28 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: The
Viking Press, 1965), p. 107.
29 Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, (3rd edn), Vol. 1 (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2003), p. 337.
30 Kretschmer quoted in Shermer and Grobman, Denying History, p. 185.
31 This gendered element of the slaughter is discussed further in Chapter 13.
32 The statistics are drawn from Landau, The Nazi Holocaust.
THE JEWISH HOLOCAUST
166
33 “Whether the Germans were killing [Jews] immediately and directly in the gas chambers
of an extermination camp or working and starving them to death in camps that they had
not constructed for the express purpose of extermination (namely in concentration or
‘work’ camps), the mortality rates of Jews in camps was at exterminatory, genocidal levels
and typically far exceeded the mortality rates of other groups living side by side with them.
. . . The monthly death rate for Jews in Mauthausen [camp] was, from the end of 1942
to 1943, 100 percent. Mauthausen was not formally an extermination camp and, indeed,
it was not for non-Jews, who at the end of 1943 all had a mortality rate below 2 percent.”
Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, p. 173.
34 On the forced marches of Jews and other camp inmates, see ch. 14, “Marching to What
End?,” in Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, pp. 355–71.
35 Niewyk, “Holocaust: The Jews,” p. 150.
36 Ibid; for Epstein’s testimony, see pp. 150–70.
37 Hitler quoted in Gerald Fleming, Hitler and the Final Solution (Berkeley, CA: University
of California Press, 1984), p. 17.
38 Tatz, With Intent to Destroy, p. 22.
39 Browning, The Path to Genocide, p. 86.
40 Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann, The Racial State: Germany 1933–1945
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 96.
41 Shermer and Grobman, Denying History, p. 213.
42 Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, Vol. 1, pp. 139–40; Arendt, Eichmann in
Jerusalem, pp. 59–60.
43 Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, pp. 117–18, 125. See also the discussion in Hilberg, The
Destruction of the European Jews, Vol. 1, pp. 218–22. “With the growth of the destructive
function of the Judenräte, many Jewish leaders felt an almost irresistible urge to look like
their German masters” (p. 219).
44 Raul Hilberg, Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe 1933–1945
(New York: Perennial, 1993), p. 170. In The Destruction of the European Jews (Vol. 2,
p. 901), Hilberg refers to “masses of Jewish deportees, numb, fantasy-ridden, and filled
with illusions, [who] reacted with mechanical cooperation to every German command”
(the specific reference is to the Hungarian deportations of 1944).
45 See Richard Rashke, Escape from Sobibor (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press,
1995); Israel Gutman, Resistance: The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (Boston, MA: Houghton
Mifflin, 1998).
46 Donat, The Holocaust Kingdom, p. 7.
47 Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust, p. 213.
48 Browning, The Path to Genocide, p. ix.
49 See Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the
Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002).
50 Reginald H. Phelps, quoted in Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, p. 443.
51 Hilberg, Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders, p. 258.
52 Burleigh, Ethics and Extermination, pp. 155, 164.
53 Burleigh and Wippermann, The Racial State, p. 51.
54 Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution
in Poland (New York: HarperPerennial, 1998), pp. 184, 186.
55 Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, pp. 277, 446.
56 Hilberg, Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders, p. 191. As Martha Minow comments, “The
creation of Israel could be viewed as a kind of international reparation effort.” Minow,
Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History after Genocide and Mass Violence
(Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1998), p. 133.
57 Alex Alvarez, Governments, Citizens, and Genocide: A Comparative and Interdisciplinary
Approach (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2001), p. 14.
58 The phrase “uniquely unique” was first used by Alice L. Eckhardt and Roy Eckhardt; see
Gunnar Heinsohn, “What Makes the Holocaust A Uniquely Unique Genocide?”, Journal
of Genocide Research, 2: 3 (2000), p. 430 (n. 95).
THE JEWISH HOLOCAUST
167
59 Katz, The Holocaust in Historical Context, p. 28.
60 Charny quoted in David Stannard, “Uniqueness as Denial: The Politics of Genocide
Scholarship,” in Alan S. Rosenbaum, ed., Is the Holocaust Unique? Perspectives on
Comparative Genocide (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998), p. 198.
61 Lopate cited in Helen Fein, Genocide: A Sociological Perspective (London: Sage
Publications, 1993), p. 52.
62 A recent polemic charges that a “Holocaust industry” has been created to win financial
concessions from banks, industrial enterprises, and others who profited from the Jewish
catastrophe. See Norman G. Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the
Exploitation of Jewish Suffering (new edn) (New York: Verso, 2003).
63 Nicholas Wheeler, Saving Strangers: Humanitarian Intervention in International Society
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 212.
64 Interestingly, Vol. 2 of Steven Katz’s The Holocaust in Historical Context, which was
supposed to apply his uniqueness thesis to twentieth-century cases of mass killing, was
scheduled for publication some years ago, but has yet to appear. I have often wondered
whether Katz hit an insuperable roadblock in applying his thesis to the Rwandan
genocide.
65 Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, Vol. 3, p. 1075.
66 Bartov, Germany’s War and the Holocaust, p. 106.
67 Thomas Cushman, “Is Genocide Preventable? Some Theoretical Considerations,”
Journal of Genocide Research, 5: 4 (2003), p. 528.
THE JEWISH HOLOCAUST
168
BOX 6A THE NAZIS’ OTHER VICTIMS
While most people associate Nazi genocide with the Jewish Holocaust, a
plethora of other victim groups actually accounted for the majority of those
killed by the Nazis. Only in 1942 did the mass murder of Jews come to
predominate, as historian Christopher Browning points out:
If the Nazi regime had suddenly ceased to exist in the first half of 1941, its
most notorious achievements in human destruction would have been the
so-called euthanasia killing of seventy to eighty thousand German mentally
ill and the systematic murder of the Polish intelligentsia. If the regime had
disappeared in the spring of 1942, its historical infamy would have rested
on the “war of destruction” against the Soviet Union. The mass death of some
two million prisoners of war in the first nine months of that conflict would
have stood out even more prominently than the killing of approximately one-
half million Jews in that same period.
“Ever since,” writes Browning, the Jewish Holocaust “has overshadowed
National Socialism’s other all-too-numerous atrocities.”
1
It does so in this book
as well. However, it is important to devote attention, however inadequate, to
Nazism’s other victims.
THE JEWISH HOLOCAUST
169
■
PRE-WAR PERSECUTIONS AND THE “EUTHANASIA” CAMPAIGN
Communists and socialists
The first Nazi concentration camp was at Dachau, near Munich. Opened in
March 1933, two months after the Nazis took power – its stated purpose was
“to concentrate, in one place, not only all Communist officials but also, if
necessary, the officials of...other Marxist formations who threaten the security
of the state.”
2
Bolshevism was as central to Hitler’s Weltanschauung (worldview)
as anti-semitism, embodying the decadent, modernist tendencies that he loathed
with a vengeance. In fact, Hitler’s ideology and geopolitical strategy is best seen
as motivated by a hatred of “Judeobolshevism,” and a conviction that the
Nazis’ territorial ambitions in Central and Eastern Europe were obtainable
only through a decisive and victorious confrontation with “the Marxist-cum-
Bolshevik ‘octopus’ and the Jewish world conspiracy.”
3
One can distinguish between pre-war and wartime phases of the campaign
against communists and socialists. In the pre-war stage, these sectors dominated
the security policies of the Reich. They were the major targets of state violence
and incarceration in camps; Jews-as-Jews were not targeted for substantial
physical violence or imprisonment until Kristallnacht in 1938, by which time
the German Left had been crushed. Communists, socialists, and other Left-
oppositionists were also purged from public institutions in a manner very similar
to the Jews.
4
After the occupation of western Poland in September–October 1939, and
especially with the invasion of eastern Poland and the Soviet Union in June
1941, the struggle against Bolshevism became intimately bound up with the
Nazis’ ambition to subdue, enslave, and exterminate the Slavic “subhuman.”
From this point on, the Nazis’ ideological struggle against communists and
socialists became intertwined with the national and military struggle with the
USSR; the threat of ethnic swamping by “barbarians from the East”; and the
assault on European Jewry.
Asocials and undesirables
The Nazis’ quest for racial purity and social homogeneity meant that “asocial”
elements were to be annihilated or, in some cases, reformed. An effective study
of this phenomenon is Robert Gellately’s book on Nazism and German public
opinion, Backing Hitler. Considered asocial was “anyone who did not participate
as a good citizen and accept their social responsibilities.” Among the groups
harassed and punished were men
5
seen as “shirking” paid work, or otherwise
congenitally prone to unemployment or vagabondage. Gellately describes a
THE JEWISH HOLOCAUST
170
“special action” organized by Nazi police chief Heinrich Himmler in March
1937 “to arrest 2,000 people out of work”:
The instruction was to send to concentration camps, those who “in the
opinion of the Criminal Police” were professional criminals, repeat offenders,
or habitual sex offenders. The enthusiasm of the police was such that they
arrested not 2,000, but 2,752 people, only 171 of whom had broken their
probation. Police used the event as a pretext to get rid of “problem cases.”
Those arrested were described as break-in specialists (938), thieves (741),
sex offenders (495), swindlers (436), robbers (56), and dealers in stolen goods
(86). Only 85 of them [3 percent] were women.
6
According to Gellately, “A recurrent theme in Hitler’s thinking was that in the
event of war, the home front would not fall prey to saboteurs, that is, anyone
vaguely considered to be ‘criminals,’ ‘pimps,’ or ‘deserters’.” The result was that
“asocial” men, along with some women accused of involvement in the sex trade
or common crimes, were confined in “camps [that] were presented as educative
institutions...places for ‘race defilers, rapists, sexual degenerates and habitual
criminals’” (quoting an article in Das Schwarze Korps newspaper). Although
“these camps were nothing like the death camps in the eastern occupied terri-
tories, the suffering, death, and outright murder in them was staggering.”
7
Just as Jews and Bolshevism blurred in the Nazis’ ideology, it is important
to recognize the overlap among asocials, Jews, and Roma (Gypsies). It was
a cornerstone of the Nazi demonization of Jews that they were essentially a
parasitic class, incapable of “honest” work and thus driven to usury, lazy cos-
mopolitanism, and criminality. Likewise, perhaps the core of the Nazi racial
hatred of Roma lay in their stereotypical depiction as shiftless and inclined to
criminal behavior. The genocidal consequences of these stereotypes are
examined in the “Other Holocausts” section, below.
Homosexual men
For all the promiscuous hatreds of Adolf Hitler, “homophobia was not one of
his major obsessions,”
8
and Hitler does not seem to have been the moving force
behind the brutal Nazi campaign against gay men. (Lesbian women were never
systematically targeted or arrested.)
9
Rather, that dubious honor goes to the
owlish Heinrich Himmler, supreme commander of the SS paramilitary force,
“whose loathing of homosexuals knew no bounds.”
10
As early as 1937, in a
speech to the SS academy at Bad Toelz, Himmler pledged: “Like stinging nettles
we will rip them [homosexuals] out, throw them on a heap, and burn them.
Otherwise...we’ll see the end of Germany, the end of the Germanic world.”
Later he would proclaim to his Finnish physiotherapist, Dr. Felix Kersten:
THE JEWISH HOLOCAUST
171
We must exterminate these people root and branch. Just think how many
children will never be born because of this, and how a people can be broken
in nerve and spirit when such a plague gets hold of it....The homosexual
is a traitor to his own people and must be rooted out.
11
As these comments suggest, the reviling of gays was intimately linked to Nazi
beliefs surrounding asocial and “useless” groups, who not only contributed
nothing productive to the body politic, but actively subverted it. Gay males –
because they chose to have sex with men – “were self-evidently failing in their
duty to contribute to the demographic expansion of the ‘Aryan-Germanic race,’
at a time when millions of young men had perished in the First World War.”
12
Just as Roma and (especially) Jews were deemed parasites on German society and
the national economy, so were gays labeled “as useless as hens which don’t lay
eggs” and “sociosexual propagation misfits.”
13
(They did, however, have their
uses: among some conquered peoples, homosexuality was to be encouraged,
since it “would hasten their degeneracy, and thus their demise.”)
14
Richard Plant’s study of the Nazi persecution of gays, The Pink Triangle,
estimated the number of men convicted for homosexual “crimes” from 1933
to 1944 to be “between 50,000 and 63,000, of which nearly 4,000 were
juveniles.”
15
In the concentration camps that were the destiny of thousands of
them, their “fate . . . can only be described as ghastly.”
16
Like the Jews, they were
forced to wear a special badge (the pink triangle of Plant’s title), were referred
to contemptuously as Mannweiber (“manwives”), and were segregated from their
fellow prisoners, who often joined in the contempt and brutalization. An inmate
at Dachau reported that “the prisoners with the pink triangle did not live very
long; they were quickly and systematically exterminated by the SS.”
17
According
to Konnilyn Feig, they found themselves “tormented from all sides as they
struggle[d] to avoid being assaulted, raped, worked, and beaten to death.”
18
Gay
men were also among the likeliest candidates for grotesque medical experiments.
At no point was support and solace likely from relatives or friends, because of
the shame and stigma attaching to their “crimes.” Plant estimates that the large
majority of homosexuals consigned to concentration camps perished there –
some 5,000 to 15,000 men.
19
Jehovah’s Witnesses and religious dissidents
If gays were dragged into the Nazi holocaust by their “traitorous” reluctance
to contribute to Germany’s demographic revival, Jehovah’s Witnesses – already
anathematized as a religious cult by the dominant Protestant and Catholic
religious communities – were condemned for refusing to swear loyalty to the
Nazi regime and to serve in the German military. In April 1935, the faith
was formally outlawed, and later that year the first 400 Jehovah’s Witnesses
were consigned to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. By 1939 the
THE JEWISH HOLOCAUST
172
number incarcerated there and in other prisons and camps had ballooned
to 6,000.
When war broke out in September 1939, the Witnesses’ rejection of military
service aroused still greater malevolence. Only a few days after the German
invasion of Poland, a believer who refused to swear loyalty to the regime, August
Dickmann, was executed by the Gestapo “in order to set an example.”
20
In all,
“Over the course of the dictatorship, as many as 10,000 members of the com-
munity were arrested, with 2,000 sent to concentration camps, where they were
treated dreadfully and as many as 1,200 died or were murdered.”
21
In a curious twist, however, a positive stereotype also arose around the
Witnesses. They came to be viewed in the camps as “industrious, neat, and tidy,
and uncompromising in [their] religious principles.” Accordingly,
the SS ultimately switched to a policy of trying to exploit [the Witnesses’]
devotion to duty and their reliability....They were used as general servants
in SS households or put to work in small Kommandos [work teams] when
there was a threat that prisoners might escape. In Ravensbrück [women’s
concentration camp], they were showcased as “exemplary prisoners,” while
in Niederhagen, the only camp where they constituted the core population,
they were put to work on renovations.
22
As for mainstream religion, in general the Nazis deeply distrusted it, preferring
their own brand of mysticism and Völk-worship. Their desire not to provoke
unrest among the general population, or (prior to 1939) international
opposition, limited their campaign against the main Protestant dominations and
the large Catholic minority in Germany. No such restraint obtained in occupied
Poland, however, where leading Catholic figures were swept up in the broad
campaign of eliticide against the Polish intelligentsia. At home, as the war turned
against Germany, religious dissidents of all stripes came to be hounded merci-
lessly, and were often imprisoned and killed. The best-known case is that of the
Protestant pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who declaimed against the Nazi regime
from his pulpit, and was hanged in Flossenburg concentration camp shortly
before the war ended. His Letters and Papers from Prison has become a classic
of devotional literature.
23
The handicapped and infirm
As with every other group the Nazis targeted, the campaign against the handi-
capped and infirm exploited a popular receptiveness based on long-standing
patterns of discrimination and anathematization in European and Western
culture. An offshoot of the Western drive for modernity was the development
of a science of eugenics, taking both positive and negative forms: “Positive
eugenics was the attempt to encourage increased breeding by those who were
THE JEWISH HOLOCAUST
173
considered particularly fit; negative eugenics aimed at eliminating the unfit.”
24
The foci of this international movement were Germany, Great Britain, and the
United States (the US pioneered the use of forced sterilization against those
considered “abnormal”).
25
In Germany, the privations of the post-First World
War period fueled similar philosophies and prescriptions. Treatises by noted legal
and medical authorities in the 1920s railed against those “unworthy of life” and
demanded the “destruction” of disabled persons in institutions. This was not
murder but “mercy death.”
26
Such views initially found strong public backing,
even among many relatives of institutionalized patients.
27
Once installed in power, the Nazis worked to deepen the trend. Within a
few months, they had promulgated the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily
Diseased Progeny, beginning a policy that by 1945 had led to the forced
sterilization of some 300,000 people. The Marriage Health Law followed in
1935, under which Germans seeking to wed were forced to provide medical
documentation proving that they did not carry hereditary conditions or afflic-
tions. If they could not so demonstrate, the application was rejected.
28
In the two years prior to the outbreak of the Second World War, Hitler
and other Nazi planners began paving the way for the collective killing of
disabled infants and children, then of adults. Hitler used the “fog of war” to
cover the implementation of the campaign (the authorization, personally signed
by Hitler on September 8, 1939, was symbolically backdated to September 1
to coincide with the invasion of Poland). “An elaborate covert bureaucracy”
29
was established in a confiscated Jewish property at Tiergartenstrasse 4 in Berlin,
and “Aktion T-4” – as the extermination program was dubbed – moved into high
gear. The program’s “task was to organise the registration, selection, transfer and
murder of a previously calculated target group of 70,000 people, including
chronic schizophrenics, epileptics and long-stay patients.”
30
All were deemed
unnutze Esser, “useless eaters” – surely one of the most macabre phrases in the
Nazi vocabulary. In the end, the plan was overfulfilled. Among the victims were
an estimated 6,000 to 7,000 children, who were starved to death or administered
fatal medication. Many adults were dispatched to a prototype gas chamber.
31
At every point in the chain of death, the complicity of nurses, doctors, and
professionals of all stripes was overwhelmingly enthusiastic but, as the scope of
the killing widened, the general population, and Germany’s churches, proved more
ambivalent, to the point of open protest. Eventually, in August 1941, “Aktion T-
4” was closed down in Germany. But a decentralized version continued in
operation until the last days of the war, and even beyond (the last victim died on
May 29, 1945, under the noses of Allied occupiers). Meanwhile, the heart of the
program – its eager supervisors and technicians – was bundled east, to manage
the extermination of Jews and others in the death camps of Treblinka, Belzec, and
Sobibor in Poland. Thus, “the euthanasia program was the direct precursor of the
death factories – ideologically, organizationally, and in terms of personnel.”
32
Predictably, then, mass murder in the eastern occupied territories also
targeted the handicapped. “In Poland the Germans killed almost all disabled
THE JEWISH HOLOCAUST
174
Poles...The same applied in the occupied Soviet Union.”
33
With the assistance
of the same Einsatzgruppen death squads who murdered hundreds of thousands
of Jews in the first year of the war, some 100,000 people deemed “unworthy of
life” were murdered at one institution alone, the Kiev Pathological Institute in
Ukraine. In all, perhaps a quarter of a million handicapped and disabled
individuals died to further the Nazis’ fanatical social-engineering scheme.
■
OTHER HOLOCAUSTS
The Slavs
The ethnic designation “Slav” derives from the same root as “slave,” and that is
the destiny to which Nazi policies sought to consign Poles, Russians, Ukrainians,
White Russians (Belorussians), and other Slavic nations. “The Slav is born a
slave crying for a master,” Hitler told his inner circle.
34
In his mind, the Slavs
were not just bestial but dangerous and expansionist, at least when dominated
and directed by Jews. It may be argued that the confrontation with the Slavs
was inseparable from, and as central as, the campaign against the Jews. Consider
the words of Colonel-General Hoepner, commander of Panzer Group 4 in the
invasion of the Soviet Union, on sending his troops into battle:
The war against the Soviet Union is an essential component of the German
people’s struggle for existence. It is the old struggle of the Germans against
the Slavs, the defense of European culture against the Muscovite-Asiatic
flood, the warding off of Jewish Bolshevism. This struggle must have as its
aim the demolition of present Russia and must therefore be conducted with
unprecedented severity. Both the planning and the execution of every battle
must be dictated by an iron will to bring about a merciless, total annihilation
of the enemy.
35
The first victims of the anti-Slav genocide were, however, Polish. There, Slavic
ethnicity combined with a nation-state that Hitler designated for genocide from
the outset. Hitler’s famous comment, “Who, after all, talks nowadays of the
annihilation of the Armenians?” (see Chapter 4) is often mistaken as referring
to the impending fate of Jews in Nazi-occupied territories. In fact, Hitler was
speaking just before the invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, referring to
commands he had issued to “kill without pity or mercy all men, women, and
children of Polish descent or language. Only in this way can we obtain the living
space we need.”
36
Richard Lukas is left in little doubt of Nazi plans:
While the Germans intended to eliminate the Jews before the end of the war,
most Poles would work as helots until they too shared the fate of the Jews.
. . . The conclusion is inescapable that had the war continued, the Poles
THE JEWISH HOLOCAUST
175
would have been ultimately obliterated either by outright slaughter in gas
chambers, as most Jews had perished, or by a continuation of the policies
the Nazis had inaugurated in occupied Poland during the war – genocide by
execution, forced labor, starvation, reduction of biological propagation, and
Germanization.
Others dispute the claim that non-Jewish Poles were destined for annihila-
tion. Nonetheless, as Lukas notes, “during almost six years of war, Poland lost
6,028,000 of its citizens, or 22 percent of its total population, the highest ratio
of losses to population of any country in Europe.” Nearly three million of the
murdered Poles were Jews, but “over 50 percent...were Polish Christians,
victims of prison, death camps, raids, executions, epidemics, starvation,
excessive work, and ill treatment.”
37
Six million Poles were also dispatched to
Germany to toil as slave-laborers. Soviet depredations during the relatively brief
period of the USSR’s occupation of eastern Poland (September 1939 to June
1941), and again after the war, also contributed significantly to the death-toll
(see Chapter 5).
As for the Slavs of Ukraine, Russia, and other parts of the Soviet Union,
their suffering is legendary. A commonly cited estimate is that more than twenty-
seven million Soviet citizens died, about eighteen million of them civilians.
38
Titanic Russian sacrifices and, eventually, crushing military force were the key
to Nazi Germany’s defeat, with the other Allies playing an important supporting
role. Between the German invasion of the USSR in June 1941 and the D-
Day invasion of France in June 1944, some 80 percent of German forces were
deployed in the East, and the overwhelming majority of German military
casualties occurred there. As Yugoslav partisan leader Arso Jovanovic put it at the
time: “Over there on the Eastern front – that’s the real war, where whole
divisions burn up like matchsticks” – and millions of civilians along with them.
39
Soviet prisoners-of-war
“Next to the Jews in Europe,” wrote Alexander Werth, “the biggest single
German crime was undoubtedly the extermination by hunger, exposure and in
other ways of . . . Russian war prisoners.”
40
Yet the murder of at least 3.3 million
Soviet POWs is one of the least-known of modern genocides; there is still no
full-length book on the subject in English.
41
It also stands as one of the most
intensive genocides of all time. The large majority of POWs, some 2.8 million,
were killed in just eight months of 1941–42, a rate of slaughter matched (to
my knowledge) only by the 1994 Rwanda genocide.
42
The Soviet men were captured in massive encirclement operations in the
early months of the German invasion, and in gender-selective round-ups that
occurred in the newly occupied territories. All men between the ages of 15 and
65 were deemed to be prisoners-of-war, and liable to be “sent to the rear.” Given
THE JEWISH HOLOCAUST
176
that the Germans, though predicting victory by such epic encirclements, had
deliberately avoided making provisions for sheltering and feeding millions of
prisoners, “sent to the rear” became a euphemism for mass murder.
“Testimony is eloquent and prolific on the abandonment of entire divisions
under the open sky,” writes Alexander Dallin:
Epidemics and epidemic diseases decimated the camps. Beatings and abuse
by the guards were commonplace. Millions spent weeks without food or
shelter. Carloads of prisoners were dead when they arrived at their desti-
nation. Casualty figures varied considerably but almost nowhere amounted
to less than 30 percent in the winter of 1941–42, and sometimes went as high
as 95 percent.
43
Figure 6.a1 A wounded
Soviet prisoner-of-war is
dispatched “to the rear;”
near Novgorod, Russia
(fall/winter 1941–42?).
Source: Corbis.
THE JEWISH HOLOCAUST
177
A Hungarian tank officer who visited one POW enclosure described “tens of
thousands of Russian prisoners. Many were on the point of expiring. Few could
stand on their feet. Their faces were dried up and their eyes sunk deep into their
sockets. Hundreds were dying every day, and those who had any strength left
dumped them in a vast pit.”
44
Cannibalism was common. Nazi leader Hermann
Goering joked that “in the camps for Russian prisoners of war, after having eaten
everything possible, including the soles of their boots, they have begun to eat
each other, and what is more serious, have also eaten a German sentry.”
45
Hundreds of thousands of Soviet prisoners were sent to Nazi concentration
camps, including Auschwitz, which was originally built to house and exploit
them. Thousands died in the first tests of the gas chamber complex at Birkenau.
Like the handicapped and Roma, then, Soviet POWs were guinea-pigs and
stepping-stones in the evolution of genocide against the Jews. The overall
estimate for POW fatalities – 3.3 million – is probably low. An important
additional group of victims comprises Soviet soldiers, probably hundreds of
thousands of them, who were killed shortly after surrendering.
In one of the twentieth century’s most tragic ironies, the two million or so
POWs who survived German incarceration were arrested upon repatriation to
the USSR, on suspicion of collaboration with the Germans. Most were sen-
tenced to long terms in the Soviet concentration camps, where tens of thousands
died in the final years of the Gulag (see Chapter 5).
The Romani genocide (
Porrajmos
)
)
Perhaps more than any other group, the Nazi genocide against Romani (Gypsy)
peoples* parallels the attempted extermination of European Jews. Roma were
subjected to virulent racism in the centuries prior to the Holocaust – denounced
as dirty, alien, and outside the bonds of social obligation. (Ironically, the Roma
“were originally from North India and belonged to the Indo-Germanic speak-
ing, or as Nazi racial anthropologists would have it, ‘Aryan’ people.”)
46
The grim phrase “lives undeserving of life,” which most people associate with
Nazi policy towards the handicapped and the Jews, was coined with reference
to the Roma in a law passed only a few months following Hitler’s ascent to
power. Mixed marriages between Germans and Roma, as between “Aryan”
Germans and Jews, were outlawed in 1935. The 1935 legislation against
“hereditarily diseased progeny,” the cornerstone of the campaign against the
handicapped, specifically included Roma among its targets.
In July 1936, more than two years prior to the first mass round-up of
Jewish men, Romani men were dispatched in their hundreds to the Dachau
* The term “Gypsy” has derogatory connotations, and is now often substituted by Roma/Romani, a practice followed
in this book.
THE JEWISH HOLOCAUST
178
concentration camp outside Munich. (The measures were popular: Michael
Burleigh noted “the obvious glee with which unwilling neighbours and local
authorities regarded the removal of Sinti and Roma from their streets and
neighbourhoods.”)
47
While Hitler decreed a brief moratorium on anti-Jewish
measures prior to the 1936 Berlin Olympics, raids were conducted in the vicinity
of Berlin to capture and incarcerate Roma.
“On Combating the Gypsy Plague” was the title of a 1937 polemic by
Heinrich Himmler, taking a break from his fulminations on homosexuals and
Jews. It “marked the definitive transition from a Gypsy policy that was under-
stood as a component of the extirpation of ‘aliens to the community’ . . . to a
persecution sui generis.”
48
The following year, the first reference to an endgültige
Lösung der Zigeunerfrage, a “total solution” to the Romani “question,” appeared
in a Nazi pronouncement.
49
A thousand more Roma were condemned to
concentration camps in 1938.
A few months after the outbreak of the Second World War, some 250 Romani
children at Buchenwald became test subjects for the infamous Zyklon-B cyanide
crystals later used to exterminate Jews en masse. In late 1941 and early 1942,
some 5,000 Roma were deported from Austria to the death camp at Chelmno,
where they were murdered in the mobile gas vans then being deployed against
Jews in eastern Poland and the Soviet Union. Up to a quarter of a million more
perished in Einsatzgruppen executions, “legitimised with the old prejudice that
the victims were ‘spies.’”
50
In December 1942, Himmler decreed that Roma be deported to the most
notorious of the death camps, Auschwitz-Birkenau. There they lived in a “family
camp” (so named because Romani families, unlike Jewish ones, were not broken
up), while the Nazi authorities decided what to do with them. A camp doctor
who spoke with psychologist Robert Jay Lifton described conditions in the
Romani barracks as “extraordinarily filthy and unhygienic even for Auschwitz,
a place of starving babies, children and adults.”
51
Those who did not die from
privation, disease, or horrific medical experiments were finally consigned to the
gas chambers in August 1944. In all, “about 20,000 of the 23,000 German and
Austrian Roma and Sinti deported to Auschwitz were killed there.”
52
When the toll of the camps is combined with Einsatzgruppen operations, the
outcome in terms of Romani mortality rates was not that different from the
Jewish Holocaust. From a much smaller population, the Roma lost between
500,000 and 1.5 million of their members in the catastrophe that they call the
Porrajmos (“Devouring”). While the lower figure is standard, Romani scholar
Ian Hancock argues that it is “grossly underestimated,” failing to recognize the
extent to which Romani victims of (for example) the Einsatzgruppen death
squads were designated as “partisans,” “asocials,” and other labels that disguised
the ethnic element.
53
Until recent years, however, the Porrajmos has been little more than a footnote
in histories of Nazi mass violence. In part, this reflects the fact that Roma
constituted a much smaller proportion of the German and European population
THE JEWISH HOLOCAUST
179
than did Jews – about 0.05 percent. In addition, most Roma before and after
the Second World War were illiterate, and thus unable to match the outpouring
of victims’ testimonies and academic analyses by Jewish survivors and scholars.
Finally, and relatedly, while anti-semitism subsided dramatically after the war,
Roma continued to be marginalized and stigmatized by European societies, as
they are today.
The result, in Sybil Milton’s words, has been “a tacit conspiracy of silence
about the isolation, exclusion, and systematic killing of the Roma, rendering
much of current Holocaust scholarship deficient and obsolete.”
54
Even in
contemporary Europe, Roma are the subject of regular violence and persecution.
Only since the late 1970s has a civil-rights movement, along with a body of
scholarly literature, arisen to confront discrimination and memorialize Romani
suffering during the Nazi era.
Germans as victims
For decades after the end of the Second World War, it was difficult to give voice
to German suffering in the war. Sixty years after the war’s end, it is easier to
accept claims that the Germans, too, should be numbered among the victims
of Nazism – and victims of Nazism’s victims.
Predictably, the discussion is most piquant within Germany (its role in
shaping German historical memory is discussed further in Chapter 14). Two
books published in 2003 symbolized the new visibility of the issue. A novel by
Nobel Prize-winning author Günter Grass, Im Krebsgang (Crabwalk), centers on
the twentieth century’s worst maritime disaster: the torpedoing of the Wilhelm
Gustloff by a Soviet submarine, as the converted luxury liner attempted to carry
refugees (and some soldiers) from East Prussia to the German heartland, ahead
of advancing Soviet armies. Nine thousand people died. In addition, a revisionist
historian, Jörg Friedrich, published Brandstätten (Fire Sites), a compendium
of grisly, never-before-seen archival photographs of German victims of Allied
fire-bombing (see Chapter 14).
55
Estimates of the death-toll in the area bombing of German cities “range from
about 300,000 to 600,000, and of injuries from 600,000 to over a million.” The
most destructive raids were those on Hamburg (July 27–28, 1943) and Dresden,
“the German Hiroshima” (February 13, 1945).
56
Both strikes resulted in raging
fire-storms that suffocated or incinerated almost all life within their radius. As
discussed in Chapter 1, various genocide scholars have described these and other
aerial bombardments as genocidal.
Included among the estimated eight million German soldiers killed on all
fronts during the war are those who died as prisoners-of-war in the Soviet Union.
Many German POWs were simply executed; most were sent to concentration
camps where, like their Soviet counterparts, they died of exposure, starvation,
and additionally overwork. “In all, at least one million German prisoners died
THE JEWISH HOLOCAUST
180
out of the 3,150,000 [captured] by the Red Army,” and this does not reflect
those summarily shot before they could be taken prisoner.
57
In one of the most
egregious cases, of 91,000 Sixth Army POWs seized following the German
surrender at Stalingrad in 1943, only 6,000 survived to be repatriated to
Germany in the 1950s.
58
A final horror inflicted on German populations was the reprisal killings
and mass expulsions of ethnic Germans from the Soviet Union and Eastern
Europe, often from territories their families had inhabited for centuries. As early
as September 1939, in the opening weeks of the Nazi invasion of Poland, an
estimated 60,000 ethnic Germans were allegedly murdered by Poles.
59
With
the German army in retreat across the eastern front in 1944–45, large numbers
of Germans fell prey to the vengeful atrocities of Soviet troops (notably in East
Prussia) and local populations (especially in Poland and Czechoslovakia). Some
twelve to fourteen million ethnic Germans were uprooted, of whom about two
million perished. Much of this occurred after the war had ended, under the aegis
of Allied occupation authorities, as the philosopher Bertrand Russell noted in
an October 1945 protest letter:
In Eastern Europe now mass deportations are being carried out by our allies
on an unprecedented scale, and an apparently deliberate attempt is being
made to exterminate millions of Germans, not by gas, but by depriving them
of their homes and of food, leaving them to die by slow and agonizing
starvation. This is not done as an act of war, but as a part of a deliberate policy
of “peace.”
60
Moreover, an agreement reached among the Allies at the Yalta Conference
(February 1945) “granted war reparations to the Soviet Union in the form of
labor services. According to German Red Cross documents, it is estimated that
874,000 German civilians were abducted to the Soviet Union.” They suffered
a higher casualty rate even than German prisoners-of-war, with some 45 percent
dying in captivity.
61
■
FURTHER STUDY
Michael Berenbaum, ed., A Mosaic of Victims: Non-Jews Persecuted and Murdered
by the Nazis. New York: New York University Press, 1990. Wide-ranging
collection of essays.
Michael Burleigh, Ethics and Extermination: Reflections on Nazi Genocide.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Essays on themes including
“euthanasia,” the German–Soviet war, and the racial state.
Henry Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final
Solution. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. The
evolution of Nazi mass murder.
THE JEWISH HOLOCAUST
181
Robert Gellately and Nathan Stoltzfus, eds, Social Outsiders in Nazi Germany.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. Examines the Nazi
campaign against “unwanted populations.”
Gerhard Hirschfeld, ed., The Policies of Genocide: Jews and Soviet Prisoners of
War in Nazi Germany. Boston, MA: Allan & Unwin, 1986. The links
between the fate of the Jews and the Soviet prisoners.
Guenter Lewy, The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2000. The first major work in English on the Roma holocaust,
though with a disturbing denialist slant.
Norman M. Naimark, The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone
of Occupation, 1945–1949. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 1995.
Strong on atrocities against German women and workers under Soviet
occupation.
Richard Plant, The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War against Homosexuals. New York:
Owl, 1986. The persecution and killing of homosexuals, described by a
refugee of the Nazi regime.
Martin K. Sorge, The Other Price of Hitler’s War: German Military and Civilian
Losses Resulting from World War II. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986.
Concise account of German suffering in the war.
Frederick Taylor, Dresden: Tuesday, February 13, 1945. New York:
HarperCollins, 2004. In-depth study of the Allied fire-bombing of the
historic German city.
Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, A Terrible Revenge: The Ethnic Cleansing of the East
European Germans, 1944–1950. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994. The
atrocities against ethnic Germans, ably cataloged.
■
NOTES
1 Christopher R. Browning, The Path to Genocide: Essays on Launching the Final
Solution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. ix.
2 Heinrich Himmler’s announcement of Dachau’s opening, quoted in Arno
J. Mayer, Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? The Final Solution in History (New
York: Pantheon, 1988), p. 125.
3 Mayer, Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?, pp. 107–8.
4 According to Dominique Vidal, approximately 150,000 communists and left-
leaning social democrats were incarcerated in concentration camps between 1933
and 1939. Vidal, “From ‘Mein Kampf’ to Auschwitz,” Le Monde diplomatique,
October 1998.
5 “The ‘work-shy’ were [defined as] males medically fit to work, but who (without
good reason) refused jobs on two occasions, or quit after a short time.” Robert
Gellately, Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2001), p. 98.
6 Gellately, Backing Hitler, p. 96.
7 Gellately, Backing Hitler, pp. 60, 63, 68, 70.
8 Geoffrey J. Giles, “The Institutionalization of Homosexual Panic in the Third
Reich,” in Gellately and Stoltzfus, eds, Social Outsiders in Nazi Germany (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 233.
THE JEWISH HOLOCAUST
182
9 “Lesbians were not subjected to formal persecution in the Third Reich, despite the
fact that some zealous legal experts demanded this....In a state which extolled
manly, martial roughness, lesbians were less of a threat to the regime than men who
subverted its crude stereotypes of ‘normal’ male behaviour.” Michael Burleigh and
Wolfgang Wippermann, The Racial State: Germany 1933–1945 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 268.
10 Richard Plant, The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War against Homosexuals (New York:
Owl Books, 1988), p. 62.
11 Himmler quoted in Plant, The Pink Triangle, pp. 89, 99.
12 Michael Burleigh, Ethics and Extermination: Reflections on Nazi Genocide
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 162.
13 Quoted in Plant, The Pink Triangle, p. 102.
14 Plant, The Pink Triangle, p. 99.
15 Plant, The Pink Triangle, p. 149.
16 Quoted in Plant, The Pink Triangle, p. 166.
17 Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, Volume 1: The Years of Persecution,
1933–1939 (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), p. 206.
18 Konnilyn Feig, “Non-Jewish Victims in the Concentration Camps,” in Michael
Berenbaum, ed., A Mosaic of Victims: Non-Jews Persecuted and Murdered by the Nazis
(New York: New York University Press, 1990), p. 163.
19 Plant, The Pink Triangle, p. 154.
20 Gellately, Backing Hitler, p. 75.
21 Ibid. For Web links and a bibliography on the persecution and killings of Jehovah’s
Witnesses, see “A Teacher’s Guide to the Holocaust: Jehovah’s Witnesses,”
http://fcit.coedu.usf.edu/holocaust/people/VictJeho.htm.
22 Wolfgang Sofsky, The Order of Terror: The Concentration Camp, trans. William
Templer (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), pp. 122–23.
23 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison (New York: Touchstone, 1997).
See also the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum page on Bonhoeffer’s life
and work at http://www.ushmm.org/bonhoeffer/.
24 Henry Friedlander, “The Exclusion and Murder of the Disabled,” in Gellately and
Stolzfus, eds, Social Outsiders in Nazi Germany, p. 146.
25 “Between 1907 and 1939, more than 30,000 people in twenty-nine [US] states
were sterilized, many of them unknowingly or against their will, while they were
incarcerated in prisons or institutions for the mentally ill.” See “Handicapped:
Victims of the Nazi Era, 1933–1945,” A Teacher’s Guide to the Holocaust, http://
fcit.coedu.usf.edu/holocaust/people/USHMMHAN.HTM.
26 Friedlander, “The Exclusion and Murder of the Disabled,” p. 147.
27 An opponent of such views, Ewald Meltzer, the director of Katherinenhof juvenile
asylum in Saxony, decided in 1925 “to carry out a poll of the views on ‘euthanasia’
held by the parents of his charges. To his obvious surprise, some 73 per cent of the
162 respondents said that they would approve ‘the painless curtailment of the
life of [their] child if experts had established that it is suffering from incurable
idiocy.’ Many of the ‘yes’ respondents said that they wished to offload the burden
represented by an ‘idiotic’ child, with some of them expressing the wish that this
be done surreptitiously, in a manner which anticipated later National Socialist
practice.” Burleigh, Ethics and Extermination, p. 121.
28 Recall that under the UN Convention definition of genocide, preventing births
within a group may be considered genocidal.
29 Burleigh, Ethics and Extermination, p. 123.
30 Ibid.
31 See “‘Wheels Must Roll for Victory!’ Children’s ‘Euthanasia’ and ‘Aktion T-4,’”
THE JEWISH HOLOCAUST
183
ch. 3 in Michael Burleigh, Death and Deliverance: ‘Euthanasia’ in Germany
c. 1900–1945 (London: Pan Books, 1994), pp. 97–127.
32 Sofsky, The Order of Terror, p. 243.
33 Friedlander, “The Exclusion and Murder of the Disabled,” p. 157.
34 Hitler quoted in Jürgen Zimmerer, “Colonialism and the Holocaust: Towards an
Archaeology of Genocide,” in Dirk Moses, ed., Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier
Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History (New York: Berghahn
Books, 2004), p. 55.
35 Quoted in Omer Bartov, Hitler’s Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 129.
36 Heinrich Himmler, tasked with engineering the destruction of the Polish people,
parroted Hitler in proclaiming that “all Poles will disappear from the world....It
is essential that the great German people should consider it as its major task to
destroy all Poles.” Hitler and Himmler quoted in Lukas, “The Polish Experience
during the Holocaust,” p. 89.
37 Lukas, “The Polish Experience,” p. 90.
38 Anthony Beevor, Stalingrad (New York: Viking Press, 1998), p. 428.
39 Quoted in Milovan Djilas, Wartime (New York: Harvest, 1980), p. 73. Omer
Bartov writes: “It was in the Soviet Union that the Wehrmacht’s back was broken
long before the Western Allies landed in France, and even after June 1944 it was in
the East that the Germans continued to commit and lose far more men....By the
end of March 1945 the Ostheer’s [German eastern front] casualties mounted to
6,172,373 men, or double its original manpower on 22 June 1941, a figure which
constituted fully four-fifths of the [Germans’] total losses...on all fronts since the
invasion of the Soviet Union.” Bartov, Hitler’s Army, pp. 29, 45. Alec Nove points
out that more Russians died in the German siege of Leningrad (1941–43) “than the
total of British and Americans killed from all causes throughout the war.” Nove,
Stalinism and After (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1975), p. 93.
40 Alexander Werth, Russia at War, 1941–45 (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1999), p.
634.
41 Interestingly, a photo of the Soviet prisoners features on the cover of a recent and
prominent volume: Robert Gellately and Ben Kiernan, eds, The Specter of Genocide:
Mass Murder in Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2003). There is, however, only a passing mention of the genocide in the text itself
(p. 260).
42 If the upper-end estimates for those killed in Bangladesh genocide of 1971 are
accurate (three million; see Box 8a), this might also match the intensiveness of
Rwanda and the genocide against Soviet POWs.
43 Alexander Dallin, German Rule in Russia, 1941–45: A Study of Occupation Policies
(2nd edn) (London: Macmillan, 1981), pp. 414–15; Omer Bartov, The Eastern
Front, 1941–45: German Troops and the Barbarization of Warfare (Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 1985), p. 110.
44 Quoted in Werth, Russia At War, pp. 635–36.
45 Quoted in Dallin, German Rule in Russia, p. 415.
46 Burleigh and Wippermann, The Racial State, p. 116.
47 Burleigh, Ethics and Extermination, p. 167.
48 Michael Zimmermann, “The National Socialist ‘Solution of the Gypsy Question,’”
ch. 7 in Ulrich Herbert, ed., National Socialist Extermination Policies: Contemporary
German Perspectives and Controversies (New York: Berghahn Books, 2000), p. 194.
49 Sybil H. Milton, “‘Gypsies’ as Social Outsiders in Nazi Germany,” in Gellately and
Stoltzfus, eds, Social Outsiders in Nazi Germany, p. 222.
50 Burleigh and Wippermann, The Racial State, p. 125.
THE JEWISH HOLOCAUST
184
51 Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide
(New York: Basic Books, 1986), p. 161 (the quoted passage is Lifton’s paraphrase).
52 Milton, “‘Gypsies’ as Social Outsiders,” p. 226.
53 Ian Hancock, “O Baro Porrajmos: The Romani Holocaust”, in William L. Hewitt,
ed., Defining the Horrific: Readings on Genocide and Holocaust in the 20th Century
(Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, 2004), p. 164. See also the discussion
of Einsatzgruppen and Sonderkommando killings of Roma in the USSR and Poland,
in Zimmermann, “The National Socialist ‘Solution of the Gypsy Question,’” pp.
197–98.
54 Sybil Milton, “Holocaust: The Gypsies,” in Samuel Totten et al., eds, Century of
Genocide (New York: Garland Publishing, 1997), p. 188.
55 Günter Grass, Crabwalk, trans. Krishna Winston (New York: Harvest, 2004); Jörg
Friedrich, Brandstätten (Berlin: Propylaen, 2003).
56 Eric Langenbacher, “The Allies in World War II: The Anglo-American
Bombardment of German Cities,” in Adam Jones, ed., Genocide, War Crimes and
the West: History and Complicity (London: Zed Books, 2004), p. 118. See also
Hermann Knell’s study of the lesser-known attack on Würzburg in March 1945,
To Destroy a City: Strategic Bombing and Its Human Consequences in World War II
(Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2003).
57 S.P. MacKenzie, “The Treatment of Prisoners in World War II,” Journal of Modern
History, 66: 3 (September 1994), p. 511.
58 Beevor, Stalingrad, p. 430.
59 Martin K. Sorge, The Other Price of Hitler’s War: German Military and Civilian
Losses Resulting from World War II (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996), p. 89.
60 Russell cited in Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, A Terrible Revenge: The Ethnic Cleansing
of the East European Germans, 1944–1950 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994),
p. 111.
61 De Zayas, A Terrible Revenge, p. 116.
Cambodia and the
Khmer Rouge
■
ORIGINS OF THE KHMER ROUGE
One view of Cambodia prior to the upheavals of the late 1960s and 1970s depicted
it as a “gentle land.” Peaceful Buddhists presided over one of the rice bowls of
Southeast Asia, where peasants owned the soil they tilled. This picture is far from
false. Indeed, Cambodia was abundant in rice, and peasant landownership was
comparatively high. But the stereotype overlooks a darker side of Cambodian history
and society: absolutism, a politics of vengeance, a ready recourse to torture. “Patterns
of extreme violence against people defined as enemies, however arbitrarily, have very
long roots in Cambodia,” wrote historian Michael Vickery.
1
Journalist Elizabeth
Becker likewise pointed to “a tradition of violence,” adding: “The Cambodian com-
munist movement was an expression of these conflicting, desperate impulses.”
2
This is not to say that “a tradition of violence” determined that the Khmer
Rouge (KR) would come to power. In fact, until relatively late in the process, it was
a marginal presence. However, neither was the Khmer Rouge an outright aberration.
Certainly, the KR’s emphasis on concentrating power and wielding it in tyrannical
fashion was entirely in keeping with Cambodian tradition. “Absolutism . . . is a core
element of authority and legitimacy in Cambodia,” writes David Roberts.
3
As for
the supposedly pacific nature of Buddhism, the religion that overwhelmingly pre-
dominated in Cambodia, Vickery denounces it as “arrant nonsense.” “That Buddhists
may torture and massacre is no more astonishing than that the Inquisition burned
people or that practicing Catholics and Protestants joined the Nazi SS.”
4
Another element of Cambodian history and politics is an aggressive nostalgia for
185
CHAPTER 7
past glories. Cambodia under the Angkor Empire, which peaked from the twelfth
to the fourteenth centuries, was a powerful nation, incorporating vast territories that
today belong to its neighbors. It extended to the South China Sea, and included
southern regions of Vietnam as well as regions of present-day Laos, Thailand, and
Burma. At the height of its power, forced laborers built the great temples of Angkor
Wat, the world’s largest religious complex. Ever since, including for the Khmer Rouge,
Angkor Wat has served as Cambodia’s national symbol.
Cambodian nationalists harked back constantly to these halcyon days, and
advanced irredentist territorial claims with varying degrees of seriousness. Most
significantly, the rich lands of today’s southern Vietnam were designated Kampuchea
Krom, “Lower Cambodia” in nationalist discourse, though they have been part of
Vietnam since at least 1840. This rivalry with Vietnam, and a messianic desire to
reclaim “lost” Cambodian territories, fed Khmer Rouge fanaticism. The government
led by the avowedly anti-imperialist Communist Party of Cambodia (the official
name of the KR) was as xenophobic and expansionist as any regime in Asia.
By the nineteenth century, Cambodia’s imperial prowess was long dissipated, and
the country easily fell under the sway of the French. On the pretext of creating a buffer
between their Vietnamese territories, British-influenced Burma, and independent
Siam (Thailand), the French established influence over the Court of King Norodom.
The king, grandfather of Prince Norodom Sihanouk who would rule during the KR’s
early years, accepted protectorate status. He eventually became little more than a
French vassal.
As elsewhere in their empire, France fueled nationalist aspirations in Cambodia
– by economic exploitation and political subordination, but also by the efforts of
French scholars, who worked to “‘recover’ a history for Cambodia.” This bolstered
“Khmer pride in their country’s heritage,” providing “the ideological foundation of
the modern drive for an expression of an independent Khmer nation.”
5
Another crucial French contribution to Khmer nationalism was the awarding of
academic scholarships to Cambodians for study in Paris. In the 1950s, the French
capital was perhaps the richest environment for revolutionary ferment anywhere
in the world. The French Communist Party, which had led the resistance to Nazi
occupation, emerged from the war as a powerful presence in mainstream politics.
Pre-war Paris had nurtured nationalists from the French colonies, including Vietnam’s
Ho Chi Minh. The postwar period likewise provided a persecution-free environment
in which Third World revolution could gestate. The Algerian Frantz Fanon, author
of The Wretched of the Earth, was a beneficiary. Others included the leadership core
of the future Khmer Rouge.
6
Those who studied in Paris in the 1950s included:
• Saloth Sar, who subsequently took the name Pol Pot, “Brother Number One” in
the party hierarchy and Prime Minister of Democratic Kampuchea during the
KR’s period in power;
• Khieu Samphan, later President of Democratic Kampuchea (DK);
• Son Sen, DK’s deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Defense and Security;
• Ieng Sary, deputy Prime Minister in charge of foreign affairs during the DK
period;
• his wife, Ieng (Khieu) Thirith, Minister of Social Action for the DK regime.
7
CAMBODIA AND THE KHMER ROUGE
186
In retrospect, Khmer Rouge fanaticism was fueled by some of the ideological currents
of the time. The French Communist Party was in its high-Stalinist phase, supporting
campaigns against “enemies of the people.” Intellectuals like Fanon, meanwhile, were
drawn to the thesis “that only violence and armed revolt could cleanse the minds of
Third World peoples and rid them of their colonial mentalities.”
8
Cambodian nationalism remained quiescent during the years of the Second World
War, which Cambodia spent under Vichy French administration,
9
but the 1950s
and 1960s were a period of nationalist ferment throughout the Third World. The
government of Prince Norodom Sihanouk was positioning itself as an anti-colonialist,
politically neutral force in Southeast Asia. Sihanouk was a leader of the Non-Aligned
Movement that burst onto the world stage at the Bandung Conference in 1955.
CAMBODIA AND THE KHMER ROUGE
187
200 mi
200 km
N
CAMBODIA
Phnom
Penh
Angkor
Mekong
River
Mekong
Delta
Tonle Sap
Lake
Kampot
Battambang
Stung Treng
Kratie
Kampong
Cham
Siem Reap
EASTERN
HIGHLANDS
Poipet
Kampong
Som
Krong
Koh Kong
Thailand
Gulf of Thailand
Pacific
Laos
Vietnam
M
t
s
.
C
a
r
d
a
m
o
m
Dangret
Mts.
Map 7.1 Cambodia
Source: Map provided by WorldAtlas.com
Many returning students flocked to the Indochinese Communist Party, which
united communist movements in Vietnam and Cambodia. Tensions soon developed
between the two wings, however. Cambodians like Pol Pot felt they “had to carry
excrement for the Vietnamese,” according to Khieu Thirith.
10
Following the 1954
Vietnamese victory over the French at Dien Bien Phu, and the signing of the Geneva
Accords, the Vietnamese withdrew from Cambodia, but split the Cambodian
membership by transferring some 1,000 of its cadres to Vietnam, leaving another
1,000 behind in Cambodia – including Pol Pot and the future core leadership of the
Khmer Rouge. This would have fateful consequences when returning communist
cadres who had spent their formative period in Vietnam were targeted by the KR for
extermination, together with all ethnic Vietnamese in Cambodia (or within reach
on the other side of the border). In the case of Vietnamese remaining in Cambodia,
the destruction was total.
In 1966, Sihanouk, whose police had been quietly implementing a campaign of
“government murder and repression” against communists in the countryside,
11
launched a crackdown on members of the urban left whom he had not fully co-opted.
Khieu Samphan and Hou Youn were forced underground in 1967. Not least of the
problems of the Cambodian Communist Party was its estrangement from Hanoi. The
North Vietnamese regime of Ho Chi Minh determined to support the neutralist and
anti-imperialist Sihanouk, and not to aid a rebellion by its Cambodian communist
“brothers.” Hanoi valued Sihanouk as a bulwark against US domination of Southeast
Asia, and therefore as an ally in the Vietnamese national struggle. By contrast, Pol
Pot’s new Cambodian communist leadership considered Sihanouk a US ally. It
decided to abandon political activity in the city for armed struggle in the remote
countryside, where the Khmer Rouge could nurture its revolution beyond Sihanouk’s
reach.
■
WAR AND REVOLUTION, 1970–75
How did Cambodia’s communists, politically marginal throughout the 1960s,
manage to seize national power in 1975? The explanation, according to Cambodia
specialist David Chandler, lies in a combination of “accidents, outside help, and
external pressures....Success, which came slowly, was contingent on events in
South Vietnam, on Vietnamese Communist guidance, on the disastrous policies
followed by the United States, and on blunders made by successive Cambodian
governments.”
12
After the US invasion of South Vietnam in 1965, conflict spilled increasingly into
Cambodia. Supplies from the North Vietnamese government, destined for the
guerrillas of the National Liberation Front in the south, moved down the “Ho Chi
Minh Trail” cutting through Laos and eastern Cambodia. US bombing of the trail,
including areas inside Cambodia from 1969, pushed Vietnamese forces deeper into
Cambodia, until they came to control significant border areas. The Vietnamese,
giving priority to their own liberation struggle, urged restraint on their Cambodian
communist allies, but in 1970, as war spread across Cambodia, the extension of
CAMBODIA AND THE KHMER ROUGE
188
Vietnamese power provided a powerful boost for the Khmer Rouge, including vital
training. In the early 1970s, the Vietnamese forces were inflicting far more damage
on Cambodian government forces than was the KR.
The Vietnamese occupation of Cambodian border areas provoked two major
responses from the United States, both central to the horrors that followed. First,
in 1970, came US support for a coup against Prince Sihanouk, whom the US saw
as a dangerous socialist and neutralist. He was replaced by Lon Nol, Sihanouk’s former
right-hand man and head of the armed forces, a general with fanatical religious
commitments who believed that “Buddhist teaching, racial virtues, and modern
science made the Khmers invincible.”
13
(Clearly, extreme chauvinism in Cambodia
was not an invention of Democratic Kampuchea.) Lon Nol duly repaid his bene-
factors by inviting the US and South Vietnam to launch an invasion of Cambodian
territory, which lasted for three months.
14
The significance of this action was outweighed by a second US response: the
escalation from 1970 of the campaign of saturation bombing first launched against
Vietnamese border sanctuaries in Cambodia in 1969. The campaign climaxed in
1973, a year that saw a quarter of a million tons of bombs dropped on Cambodia in
just six months. This was one-and-a-half times as much high explosive as the US had
unleashed on Japan during the whole of the Second World War – a country with
which it was at least formally at war. In total, between 1969 and 1973, more than
half a million tons of munitions descended on rural Cambodia.
The impact was devastating. Tens or hundreds of thousands of Cambodians
were killed.
15
After bombing raids, “villagers who happened to be away from home
returned to find nothing but dust and mud mixed with seared and bloody body
parts.”
16
Moreover, the assault effectively destroyed the agricultural base of an
agricultural nation – more effectively, in fact, than had Stalin with his collectivization
campaign against the Soviet peasantry (Chapter 5). “The amount of acreage
cultivated for rice dropped from six million at the beginning of the war to little more
than one million at the end of the bombing campaign,” writes Elizabeth Becker.
17
Malnutrition was rampant, and mass starvation was only avoided by food aid from
US charitable organizations. (This should be borne in mind when the aftermath of
the Khmer Rouge victory is considered, below.)
18
Probably genocidal in itself, unquestionably “one of the worst aggressive
onslaughts in modern warfare,”
19
the US bombing of a defenseless population was
also the most important factor in bringing the genocidal Khmer Rouge to power. One
KR leader who defected, Chhit Do, eloquently captured the political impact of the
bombardment:
Every time after there had been bombing, [the Khmer Rouge guerrillas] would
take the people to see the craters, to see how big and deep the craters were, to see
how the earth had been gouged out and scorched. . . . The ordinary people . . .
sometimes literally shit in their pants when the big bombs and shells came. . . .
Their minds just froze up and they would wander around mute for three or four
days. Terrified and half-crazy, the people were ready to believe what they were told.
. . . That was what made it so easy for the Khmer Rouge to win the people over.
CAMBODIA AND THE KHMER ROUGE
189
...It was because of their dissatisfaction with the bombing that they kept on
cooperating with the Khmer Rouge, joining up with the Khmer Rouge, sending
their children off to go with them.
20
“This is not to say that the Americans are responsible for the genocide in Cambodia,”
as Michael Ignatieff notes. “It is to say that a society that has been pulverised by war
is a society that is very susceptible to genocide.”
21
Under the Paris Peace Accords of 1973, Vietnamese forces evacuated Cambodia,
but the focus of military opposition to the Lon Nol regime had already shifted to
the Khmer Rouge. Buoyed by Vietnamese arms and training, they were now a
hardened and effective force – at least a match for poorly motivated and half-starved
government conscripts. The KR moved rapidly to besiege Phnom Penh and other
cities. Meanwhile, in the areas of the countryside already under their control, they
implemented the first stage of their distinctive – and phenomenally destructive –
revolutionary ideology.
■
A GENOCIDAL IDEOLOGY
In their jungle camps, the Khmer Rouge developed the philosophy that would guide
their genocidal program. Let us consider the basic elements of this world view, and
its consequences from 1975 to 1979:
• Hatred of “enemies of the people.” Like many communist revolutionaries of
the twentieth century – notably those in the USSR and China – the KR exhibited
a visceral hatred of the revolution’s enemies, and targeted them mercilessly. As
with Lenin-Stalin and Mao Zedong, too, “enemies” were loosely defined. They
could be members of socioeconomic classes. The Khmer Rouge targeted the rich/
bourgeoisie; professionals (including those who returned from abroad to help
the new regime); “imperialist stooges” (collaborators with the US and its client
regime in Phnom Penh); and the educated class. In effect, this swept up most
urbanites. Enemies could also be designated on ethnic grounds. Just as Stalin
waged genocide against the people of Ukraine and the Caucasus, so the Khmer
Rouge exterminated ethnic Vietnamese, Chinese, Muslim Chams – in fact,
almost every ethnic minority in Cambodia. (Even geographically defined Khmers
were targeted for annihilation, such as those from southern Vietnam or the
“traitorous” Eastern Zone in 1978.) The enemy could also be religious believers
seen to be out of step with the KR pseudo-religion that now ruled the roost.
Lastly, enemies could be purged on the basis of supposed subversion or betrayal
of the revolution from within. Stalin’s purges of the Soviet Communist Party
(Chapter 5) would be matched and exceeded, relative to population and party
membership, by the Khmer Rouge’s hysterical attacks on internal enemies.
• Xenophobia and messianic nationalism. As noted, the KR – in tandem with other
Cambodian nationalists – harked back to the Angkor Empire. As is standard with
nationalism, territorial claims reflected the zenith of power in the nation’s past.
Pol Pot and his regime apparently believed in their ability to reclaim the “lost”
CAMBODIA AND THE KHMER ROUGE
190
Cambodian territories of Kampuchea Krom in southern Vietnam. Territorial
ambitions were combined with a broader fear and hatred of ethnic Vietnamese,
seen both as Cambodia’s historical enemy and the betrayer of Cambodian
communism. A desire was imputed to the Vietnamese to conquer Cambodia and
destroy its revolution – a paranoid vision that harmonized with the Khmer
Rouge’s messianic sense of Cambodia as “the prize other powers covet.”
22
Racism and xenophobia produced an annihilationist ideology that depicted
Cambodia’s ethnic Vietnamese minority as a deadly internal threat to the survival
of the Khmer nation. Khmer Krom from the historically Cambodian territories
of southern Vietnam were targeted with similar venom. Finally, the xenophobia
led to repeated Cambodian invasions of Vietnamese territory in 1977 and 1978.
These eventually sparked the Vietnamese invasion that overthrew the regime.
• Peasantism, anti-urbanism, and primitivism. Like the Chinese communists, but
unlike the Soviets, the Khmer Rouge gleaned support from rural rather than
urban populations. Peasants were the guardians of the true and pure Cambodia
against alien, cosmopolitan city-dwellers. However, the Khmer Rouge vision of
the peasantry was misguided from the first. As Ben Kiernan pointed out, the DK
regime attacked the three foundations of peasant life: religion, land, and family.
The KR rejected the peasants’ attachment to Buddhist religion; imputed to
peasants a desire for agricultural collectivization that was alien to Cambodia;
revived the hated corvée (forced labor); and sought to destabilize and dismantle
the family unit.
The primitivist dimension of Khmer Rouge ideology seems to have been
influenced by the tribal peoples among whom KR leaders lived in Cambodia’s
eastern jungles. These people, in particular the Khmer Loeu (highland Khmer),
often welcomed the KR presence at first. They provided indispensable refuge and
sustenance for the party in its nascent period. “Pol Pot and Ieng Sary...claimed
later to have been inspired by the spirit of people who had no private property,
no markets, and no money. Their way of life and their means of production
corresponded to the primitive communist phase of social evolution in Marxist
thinking,” and likely influenced the KR decision to abandon the market and the
money economy.
23
Soldiers from the highland tribes played an important role
in the KR’s final campaign to crush the Lon Nol regime, but increasingly fell
victim to the genocide against ethnic minorities under DK (see below).
24
A bizarre aspect of KR primitivism was the conviction that no natural challenge
was insuperable, no scientific accomplishment unattainable, if peasant energies
and know-how were tapped. “The young are learning their science from the
workers and peasants, who are the sources of all knowledge,” declared Radio
Phnom Penh.
25
“Formerly to be a pilot required a high school education – twelve
to fourteen years,” declared another classic piece of propaganda. “Nowadays, it’s
clear that political consciousness is the decisive factor....As for radar, we can
learn how to handle it after studying for a couple of months.”
26
Not surprisingly,
the Khmer Rouge air force never amounted to much.
In Mao Zedong’s “Great Leap Forward,” an almost identical mentality had
produced outcomes in China that were both absurd and catastrophic. Agriculture
reeled from faux-scientific attempts to boost crop yields. Backyard furnaces
CAMBODIA AND THE KHMER ROUGE
191
churned out unusable steel. Vast conscript forces toiled on dams that collapsed
with the first river swell. In addition, the diversion of resources, combined with
willful misreporting of production figures, produced history’s worst famine.
27
Undeterred, the DK regime announced that an even more impressive “Super
Great Leap Forward” would be initiated in Cambodia. Like Mao’s experiment,
the Super Great Leap would be about self-sufficiency. Foreign help was neither
desirable nor required, and even the Chinese model was dismissed. Indeed, the
country would be all but sealed off from the outside world.
28
• Purity, discipline, militarism. Like the Nazis, the Khmer Rouge expressed their
racism through an obsessive emphasis on racial purity. Like the Soviets and
Chinese, purity was also defined by class origin, and as an unswerving fealty to
revolutionary principle and practice. Self-discipline was a critical component.
It demonstrated revolutionary ardor and self-sacrifice. In most revolutions of Left
and Right, rigorous discipline has spawned an ideology of chaste sexuality –
though this has not necessarily been matched in practice. There is little question
that the Khmer Rouge presided over a regime of “totalitarian puritanism,”
29
perhaps without equal in the twentieth century. Among other things, “any sex
before marriage was punishable by death in many cooperatives and zones.”
30
Discipline among revolutionaries also buttresses the inevitable military
confrontation with the counter-revolution. Kiernan and Boua consider militarism
to be the defining feature of Khmer Rouge rule, reflected in “the forced evacuation
of the cities, the coercion of the population into economic programmes organized
with military discipline, the heavy reliance on the armed forces rather than civilian
cadres for administration, and the almost total absence of political education or
attempts to explain administrative decisions in a way that would win the psy-
chological acceptance of the people affected by them.”
31
Some of the ironies and contradictions of Khmer Rouge ideology should be
stressed. Despite their idealization of the peasants, no senior Khmer Rouge leader
was of peasant origin. Virtually all were city-bred intellectuals. Pol Pot came from
the countryside, but from a prosperous family with ties to the Royal Court in
Phnom Penh. As noted above, the core group of leaders belonged to the small,
privileged intellectual class able to study overseas on government scholarships.
These racist chauvinists, opposed to any foreign “interference” including assis-
tance, were by background among the most “cosmopolitan” Cambodians in
history. The genocide they inflicted on intellectuals and urban populations in
general, as well as on hundreds of thousands of peasants, was thus profoundly
hypocritical as well as indelibly brutal.
■
A POLICY OF “URBICIDE,” 1975
Throughout world history, human civilization has meant urbanization (the Latin
civitas is the etymological root of both “city” and “civilization”). Accordingly, forces
that aim to undermine a civilization or destroy a human group often attack the urban
foundations of group identity. “Deliberate attempts at the annihilation of cities as
mixed physical, social, and cultural spaces”
32
constitute urbicide.
33
The term was
CAMBODIA AND THE KHMER ROUGE
192
originally coined in the Serbo-Croatian language, by Bosnian architects, to describe
the Serb assault on Sarajevo and the Croat attack on Mostar during the Balkan
wars of the 1990s, but there are numerous historical precedents. A classical example,
one of many, is the Roman siege and obliteration of Carthage (see Chapter 1).
Significantly, this was preceded by an ultimatum that the Carthaginians abandon
their city for the countryside. When the ultimatum failed to produce the desired
results, the Romans made plain their opposition to Carthage as a city. They razed it
to rubble, and consigned the surviving population to dispersal as slaves across the
known world.
Apart from the Balkans case, contemporary examples of urbicide include the Nazi
assaults on Leningrad and Stalingrad during the Second World War; the Syrian assault
on the rebellious city of Hama in 1982; and the Russian obliteration of Grozny in
Chechnya (1994–95). There are few more vivid instances, however, than the policy
imposed by the Khmer Rouge on Phnom Penh and other cities in March 1975. “For
most of the people in Cambodia’s towns what happened during those few days
literally overturned their lives.”
34
Within hours of arriving in the capital, the Khmer Rouge was rounding up its
two million residents for deportation to the countryside. Bedraggled caravans of
deportees headed back to their old life (in the case of refugees from rural zones) or
to a new one of repression and privation (for the urbanites). Similar scenes occurred
in other population centers nationwide. Without damage to a single building, whole
cities were destroyed.
To residents, the Khmer Rouge justified the deportations on the grounds that the
Americans were planning an aerial attack on Cambodian cities. (Given recent history,
this was not an inconceivable prospect.) To an international audience – on the rare
occasions when KR leaders bothered to provide rationales – the urbicide was depicted
as a humanitarian act. With the end of the US aid that had fed swollen city popu-
lations, albeit inadequately, “the population had to go where the food was,” in the
words of Ieng Sary.
35
But this excuse faltered in light of the KR’s obstinate emphasis
on self-sufficiency. Most revealingly, foreign donations of food and other aid went
unsolicited, and were rejected when offered.
Instead, as Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn have contended, the reason for the
evacuations was found in Khmer Rouge ideology: “the deportations were nothing less
than an attack on the very idea of a city.”
36
The urban environment was associated
with corruption, exploitation, and Western decadence. These ran counter to the
revolutionary cadre’s purity, self-discipline, and respect for Cambodian tradition. One
might also speculate that the personal experience of the Khmer Rouge leaders was
mirrored in the deportations. The few urban communists had been banned,
persecuted, and killed under Sihanouk. In the end, the leaders were forced to flee to
remote rural areas. Why should not the urban population, “unproductive” and
politically suspect as it was, be forced to do the same in 1975?
After the urbicide, and for the remainder of the DK period, Phnom Penh and other
cities remained ghost towns. They were inhabited by only a skeleton crew of KR
leaders, cadres, and support staff. The countryside thus served as the backdrop for
the Khmer Rouge assault on Cambodia’s culture and people.
CAMBODIA AND THE KHMER ROUGE
193
■
“BASE PEOPLE” VS. “NEW PEOPLE”
The peasantry, the base of Khmer Rouge support, were depicted as “base” people
(neak moultanh). Deported city-folk were “new” people (neak thmey), late arrivals to
the revolution. In a sense, though, all of Cambodia was new and revolutionary in
the Khmer Rouge conception. The year 1975 was declared “Year Zero” – a term that
evokes the nihilistic core of KR policies.
The reception that awaited new people varied significantly, in ways that decisively
affected their chances of survival. Some reports attest to a reasonably friendly welcome
from peasants. In other cases, the peasants – who had suffered through the savage
US bombing campaign and the violence and upheaval of civil war – felt the
newcomers had received a just comeuppance. This was bolstered by the preferential
treatment the base people received from most KR authorities. Srey Pich Chnay, a
Cambodian former urbanite, described his experiences to Ben Kiernan and Chanthou
Boua in 1979:
The Khmer Rouge treated the peasants as a separate group, distributing more food
to them than to the city people, and assigning them easier tasks (usually around
the village), whereas the city people almost always worked in the fields. Sometimes
the peasants, as well as the Khmer Rouge themselves, would say to the newcomers,
“You used to be happy and prosperous. Now it’s our turn.”
37
Loung Ung’s memoir conveys the tension of this confrontation between different
worlds, and the experience, unfamiliar to a privileged urbanite, of finding herself
suddenly despised:
The new people are considered the lowest in the village structure. They have no
freedom of speech, and must obey the other classes. The new people...cannot
farm like the rural people. They are suspected of having no allegiance to the Angkar
[i.e., the KR leadership] and must be kept under an ever-watchful eye for signs
of rebellion. They have led corrupt lives and must be trained to be productive
workers. To instill a sense of loyalty . . . and break what the Khmer Rouge views
as an inadequate urban work ethic, the new people are given the hardest work
and the longest hours.
38
There is a flavor here of subaltern genocide, a “genocide by the oppressed” against those
seen as oppressors (see Chapter 1). Michael Vickery has argued that the DK period
was characterized above all by the revolutionary terror of the peasantry against
urbanites and the intellectual/professional classes: “It is certainly safe to assume that
[KR leaders] did not foresee, let alone plan, the unsavory developments of 1975–79.
They were petty-bourgeois radicals overcome by peasant romanticism.”
39
Elizabeth Becker likewise suggests that peasants “formed the visceral basis of the
revolution and the totalitarianism it produced.”
40
However, there are difficulties with
this framing. One is that, as Kiernan has pointed out, Vickery’s informants were
predominantly non-peasants, poorly placed to describe the dynamics of a peasant
CAMBODIA AND THE KHMER ROUGE
194
revolution. Another is that, as we have seen, power was centralized in a leadership
that was overwhelmingly urban and intellectual. Even at the regional and local level,
where KR cadres with a peasant background were more likely to hold sway, there is
little evidence that their policies responded to a groundswell of peasant resentment.
Rather, they reflected instructions and frameworks supplied by the center. “By 1977,”
writes Kiernan, “the DK system was so tightly organized and controlled that little
spontaneous peasant activity was possible.”
41
■
CAMBODIA’S HOLOCAUST, 1975–79
Our brothers and sisters of all categories, including workers, peasants, soldiers, and
revolutionary cadres have worked around the clock with soaring enthusiasm, paying
no attention to the time or to their fatigue; they have worked in a cheerful atmosphere
of revolutionary optimism.
Radio Phnom Penh broadcast under the KR
There were no laws. If they wanted us to walk, we walked; to sit, we sat; to eat, we ate.
And still they killed us. It was just that if they wanted to kill us, they would take us off
and kill us.
Cham villager interviewed by Ben Kiernan
In Cambodia between 1975 and 1978, the KR’s genocidal ideology found full
expression. The result was one of the worst genocides, relative to population, in
recorded history. In less than four years, mostly in the final two, mass death descended
on the Cambodian population. In substantial part, this was the result of direct KR
murders of anyone perceived as an enemy. Internal purges reached a crescendo in
1977–78, claiming hundreds of thousands of lives. Even more significant were the
privation, disease, and ultimately famine that rent rural Cambodia. This swelled
the death-toll to an estimated 1.7 to 1.9 million, out of a population estimated at
just under eight million in April 1975. Between 21 and 24 percent of the entire
Cambodian population died in the short period under discussion.
42
Most scholars, however, accept that “complex regional and temporal variations”
were evident under the KR.
43
Temporally, life in many regions appears to have been
spartan but tolerable for most of the first two years of KR rule. State terror had yet
to descend with full force. Thousands of executions certainly accompanied the forced
evacuations of Phnom Penh and other cities, and more took place in the countryside,
but there are also accounts of moderate and reasonable Khmer Rouge cadres.
Then things changed. “Most survivors of DK agree that living conditions (that
is, rations, working hours, disruptions to family life, and the use of terror) deteriorated
sharply in 1977.” David Chandler points to three reasons for the shift: “the regime’s
insistence on meeting impossible agricultural goals at a breakneck pace”; growing
leadership paranoia about “plots”; and, further fueling that paranoia, the mounting
conflict with Vietnam.
44
The most exterminatory period was probably the final one:
in 1978, prior to Vietnam’s successful invasion in December. The repression visited
upon the Eastern Zone over the preceding months had turned it into a graveyard,
with up to a quarter of a million people killed.
45
CAMBODIA AND THE KHMER ROUGE
195
The extent of regional variation in Democratic Kampuchea is one of the most
hotly debated aspects of the KR regime. Michael Vickery has argued that “almost no
two regions were alike with respect to conditions of life”:
The Southwestern and Eastern Zones, the most important centers of pre-1970
communist activity, were the best organized and most consistently administered,
with the East, until its destruction in 1978, also providing the more favorable
conditions of life, in particular for “new” people. In contrast, the West, the
Northwest, except for [the region of] Damban 3, and most of the North-Center,
were considered “bad” areas, where food was often short, cadres arbitrary and
murderous, and policy rationales entirely beyond the ken of the general
populace.
46
Other scholars, however, emphasize the “unchanging character” and “highly
centralized control” that marked KR rule.
47
Central direction was certainly evident
in the establishment and operation of three key genocidal institutions: the forced-
labor system, the mass executions, and the internal purge.
CAMBODIA AND THE KHMER ROUGE
196
■
BOX 7.1 ONE GIRL’S STORY: LOUNG UNG
“We are very modern – our bathroom is equipped with amenities such as a flushing
toilet, an iron bathtub, and running water. I know we are middle-class because of
our apartment and the possessions we have.” So wrote Loung Ung at the outset of
her memoir, First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers.
48
Loung indeed belonged to a privileged minority. She was a Chinese Cambodian
whose father, Ung, was a fairly successful businessman. As for his rank of major in
the Cambodian army, he said it was forced on him by the Lon Nol dictatorship.
Nonetheless, it branded him as an “imperialist stooge” in the eyes of the communist
revolutionaries in the countryside.
For some years, the family lived in comfortable isolation in the capital, Phnom Penh.
Loung attended a private school, and studied French and Chinese as well as Khmer.
But apocalyptic changes were looming.
Loung was not quite 5 years old in April 1975 when strange men in black pajamas
paraded menacingly through the streets of Phnom Penh. They were the Khmer
Rouge guerrillas, who had crushed Lon Nol’s army and seized power. Within hours,
along with two million other residents of refugee-swollen Phnom Penh, Loung and
her family were forcibly deported to the Cambodian countryside. It was “Year Zero,”
and one of the most far-reaching revolutions of the twentieth century was underway.
After days of exhausting walking, the family arrived at the village of Krang Truop,
located in the Western Zone of the newly declared country of Democratic
• Forced labor imposed a work regime that was unprecedented in modern
Cambodia. Both base people and new people arose before dawn and were allowed
to rest only after dark.
49
Food was distributed exclusively in communal kitchens,
and after the 1975–76 interlude there was almost never enough. What good
harvests occurred were confiscated in large part by KR cadres. The population
CAMBODIA AND THE KHMER ROUGE
197
Kampuchea. The transition from city to countryside shocked Loung’s childish
sensibilities. “Here, instead of concrete city buildings and houses, people live in huts
made out of straw that squat on four stilts above elephant grass in the middle of
rice paddies....‘The village is so poor,’ I say to Pa.”
“So are we,” cautioned her father. “From now on we are as poor as all these people
here.” If anyone were to discover his affiliation with the former government, it might
mean death for all of them. Loung learned: “Not only am I never to talk to anyone
about our former lives, but I’m never to trust anyone either.”
When dangerously familiar faces appeared in the village a few months after the
revolution, the family fled to a new location. Food supplies, adequate in the first
months, began to dry up, and there was no market – or money – to buy more. “To
survive, my older siblings shake the trees at night, hoping to find June bugs. The
younger kids, because we are closer to the ground, catch frogs and grasshoppers
for food.”
The family stayed on the move, hoping to keep a step ahead of the Khmer Rouge’s
security apparatus. Its murderous ways were already becoming widely known
through stories related in hushed voices late at night – the only time that people
could gather, after exhausting days of work in the paddies and forests. “We live and
are treated like slaves,” Loung related. “Hunger, always there is hunger.” Religious
worship was banned. The new religion was the Khmer Rouge’s genocidal blend of
Khmer racism, totalitarianism, and peasant communism.
The family alighted in the Northwestern Zone, probably the harshest in the entire
country. There, Loung’s sister died of food poisoning. Soon after, her father was led
away by Khmer Rouge soldiers, never to return. “I cannot stop thinking of Pa and
whether or not he died with dignity. . . . Some prisoners are not dead when they
are buried.”
With the family decimated, the true reign of terror began. “Entire families disappear
overnight....We all pretend not to notice their disappearance.” Combined with
the mass murder of suspected traitors and “enemies of the people,” there was the
relentless work, the constantly gnawing hunger. Deliverance came only with the
Vietnamese invasion that expelled the Khmer Rouge from power. Loung made her
way first to Vietnam, then to a refugee camp in Thailand. In 1980, she began a new
life in the United States.
could not buy extra supplies: money and markets were outlawed. They could not
supplement rations with produce from their own plots, since all private property
was banned. They could not engage – legally, at least – in traditional peasant
foraging for alternative food sources. Any attempt to do so was seen as distracting
from work, and was severely punished. They could not even draw upon networks
of family solidarity and sharing. Although the KR never banned the family per
se, they invigilated and eroded it by various means.
50
Those who fell sick from overwork and malnutrition, or from the malaria that
spread across Cambodia when the KR decided to refuse imports of pesticide, had
little hope of treatment. Medicine was scarce, and usually reserved for the KR
faithful. In addition, former urban residents from the Southwestern Zone, one
of six main administrative zones in the DK, were again relocated en masse to the
Northwestern Zone. Some 800,000 people were dumped in the northwest with
desperately inadequate provisions. Perhaps 200,000 died of starvation, or in the
mass killings that descended in 1978, when imported cadres from the South-
western Zone imposed a new round of purges (described below).
• Mass executions. These were generally conducted against “class enemies,” on the
one hand, and ethnic minorities on the other. Suspect from the start, “new people”
were the most likely Khmer victims of such atrocities. Frequently, entire families
would be targeted. “The Khmer Rouge actually had a saying...which encour-
aged such slaughter: ‘To dig up grass, one must also dig up the roots’ (chik smav
trauv chik teang reus)....This phrase meant that cadres ‘were supposed to “dig
up” the entire family of an enemy – husband, wife, kids, sometimes from the
grandparents down – so that none remained...to kill off the entire line at once
so that none of them would be left to seek revenge later, in turn.’”
51
A witness to
one mass execution, Bunhaeng Ung, provided a ghastly account:
Loudspeakers blared revolutionary songs and music at full volume. A young
girl was seized and raped. Others were led to the pits where they were slaugh-
tered like animals by striking the backs of their skulls with hoes or lengths
of bamboo. Young children and babies were held by the legs, their heads
smashed against palm trees and their broken bodies flung beside their dying
mothers in the death pits. Some children were thrown in the air and bayoneted
while music drowned their screams. ...At the place of execution nothing was
hidden. The bodies lay in open pits, rotting under the sun and monsoon
rains.
52
These were the “killing fields” made infamous by the 1985 film of the same
name.
53
How many died in such executions is uncertain, but it was in the
hundreds of thousands.
• Violent internal purges became a feature of KR insurgent politics well before
the revolutionary victory, but after Democratic Kampuchea was established, the
paranoia of the KR leaders increased, and their zeal for purges along with it. Pol
Pot declared before a party audience in 1976 that “a sickness [exists] inside the
party”: “As our socialist revolution advances...seeping more strongly into every
corner of the party, the army and among the people, we can locate the ugly
CAMBODIA AND THE KHMER ROUGE
198
microbes.”
54
The language was strikingly similar to that employed by Stalin’s
henchmen against “enemies of the people” in the 1930s.
During the DK period, two major regional purges occurred. Both were carried
out by Ta Mok, nicknamed “The Butcher” for his efforts. The first, as noted
above, occurred in 1977–78 in the Northwestern Zone. The second, more of a
“conventional military suppression campaign,”
55
was launched in May 1978
against the sensitive Eastern Zone bordering Vietnam. The east, “the heartland
of Khmer communism,” was the best-administered zone in the country; but the
Phnom Penh authorities viewed its residents and cadres as “Khmer bodies with
Vietnamese minds.”
56
The campaign pushed the Eastern Zone into open
rebellion against the center, and finally into the arms of Vietnam. Eastern Zone
rebels would give a “Cambodian face” to the Vietnamese invasion at the end of
the year, and to the the People’s Republic of Kampuchea which it established.
Tens of thousands of victims of these and other purges passed through KR
centers designed for interrogation, torture, and execution. The most notorious
was Tuol Sleng in the capital, codenamed “S-21,” where an estimated 14,000
prisoners were incarcerated during the KR’s reign. Only ten are known to have
survived.
57
Now a Museum of Genocide in Phnom Penh, it was one of many such
centers across Democratic Kampuchea (see Figure 7.1).
As in Mao’s China and Stalin’s USSR, the purges fed on themselves, and
eventually undermined the capacity of the revolution to resist its enemies. Just
as Stalin’s purges of the Soviet military and bureaucracy left the USSR exposed
to Nazi invasion, the Khmer Rouge killing sprees paved the way for Vietnam’s
rapid conquest of Cambodia in 1978.
■
GENOCIDE AGAINST BUDDHISTS AND ETHNIC MINORITIES
Early commentaries on Khmer Rouge atrocities emphasized the targeting of class
and political enemies. Subsequent scholarship, especially by Ben Kiernan, has revealed
the extent to which the KR also engaged in genocidal targeting of religious groups
and ethnic minorities.
Cambodian Buddhism suffered immensely under the genocide: “the destruction
was nearly complete, with more devastating consequences for Cambodia than the
Chinese attack on Buddhism had had for Tibet” (Box 3a).
58
Religious institutions
were emptied, and often obliterated. Monks were sent to the countryside or executed.
“Of the sixty thousand Buddhist monks only three thousand were found alive after
the Khmer Rouge reign; the rest had either been massacred or succumbed to hard
labor, disease, or torture.”
59
A patchwork of ethnic minorities, together constituting about 15 percent of the
population, was exposed to atrocities and extermination. Local Vietnamese were
targeted most virulently. Kiernan offers the stunning estimate that fully 100 percent
of ethnic Vietnamese perished under the Khmer Rouge.
60
The Muslim Chams were
despised for their religion as well as their ethnicity. “Their religion was banned, their
schools closed, their leaders massacred, their villages razed and dispersed.”
61
Over one-
third of the 250,000 Chams alive in April 1975 perished under DK.
62
CAMBODIA AND THE KHMER ROUGE
199
As for Cambodia’s Chinese population, it was concentrated in the cities, and it is
sometimes hard to distinguish repressive action based on racial hatred from repression
against the urbanite “new people.” Regardless, in DK this group “suffered the worst
disaster ever to befall any ethnic Chinese community in Southeast Asia.”
63
Only half
the Chinese population of 430,000 at the outset of Khmer Rouge rule survived to
see its end.
The grim tale of minority suffering under the Khmer Rouge does not end there.
“The Thai minority of 20,000 was reportedly reduced to about 8,000. Only 800
families survived of the 1,800 families of the Lao ethnic minority. Of the 2,000
members of the Kola minority, ‘no trace...has been found.’”
64
■
AFTERMATH: POLITICS AND THE QUEST FOR JUSTICE
On December 25, 1978, 150,000 Vietnamese soldiers, accompanied by 15,000
Cambodian rebels and air support, crossed the border of Democratic Kampuchea and
seized Phnom Penh in two weeks. The Khmer Rouge leadership fled to sanctuaries
CAMBODIA AND THE KHMER ROUGE
200
Figure 7.1 Some of the haunting photos of victims of “S-21,” the Tuol Sleng torture and execution center in Phnom Penh,
today a Museum of Genocide. Only ten inmates out of 14,000 survived their incarceration at Tuol Sleng. The Khmer Rouge
carefully registered and photographed the prisoners; this provides valuable evidence of the Cambodian genocide.
Source: Courtesy Ben Kiernan.
in western Cambodia and across the border in Thailand.
65
The KR would use these
for the ensuing decade-and-a-half as it fought to return to power through a tripartite
coalition of forces opposed to Vietnamese occupation. (Prince Sihanouk, who had
spent most of the DK years under de facto house arrest in Phnom Penh, served as
figurehead for the coalition from 1982.) Meanwhile, former KR leaders, the rebels
from the Eastern Zone, were appointed as Vietnamese surrogates to run the new
People’s Republic of Kampuchea (PRK). While Heng Samrin was appointed
president, real power eventually fell into the hands of his former subordinate in the
Eastern Zone, Hun Sen.
Throughout the 1980s, in one of the twentieth century’s “more depressing
episodes of diplomacy,”
66
the Western world moved from branding the Khmer Rouge
as communist monsters to embracing them as Cambodia’s legitimate representatives.
The US led a push to grant Cambodia’s General Assembly seat to the anti-Vietnamese
coalition dominated by the Khmer Rouge.
Why this Orwellian flip-flop? US hostility to Vietnam was still pronounced
after the US defeat of 1975. An enemy of Vietnam was America’s friend, regardless
of its sanguinary past. Thus one witnessed the anomalous sight, throughout the
1980s, of genocidal communists receiving some of their firmest backing from
Washington, DC. China was also an important player – as it had been throughout
the Khmer Rouge years in power, despite KR pledges to make Cambodia “self-
sufficient.”
In October 1991, with the Cold War at an end, the Comprehensive Political
Settlement of the Cambodian Conflict was signed in Paris. Vietnamese forces had left
the country in 1989. The United Nations stepped in to supervise the peace process.
It launched UNTAC, the UN Transitional Authority in Cambodia, “the single most
ambitious field operation in [UN] history.”
67
However, the path to national elections
in 1993 was fraught with difficulties. The Khmer Rouge boycotted the vote, and
stepped up military attacks.
Ultimately, in May 1993, relatively peaceful elections were held, but they did
not produce the results Hun Sen desired. Voters gave a plurality of votes to Prince
Ranariddh, son of Norodom Sihanouk. Hun Sen, the “great survivor of Cambodian
politics,”
68
then used his control over Cambodia’s key institutions to strong-arm
Ranariddh into accepting a coalition government. By 1997, Hun Sen had tired of
the arrangement. He launched what was in essence a coup d’état, re-establishing
himself as the unquestioned supreme authority. The absolutist strain in Cambodian
politics was proving difficult to shake, especially against a backdrop of economic and
social breakdown.
Amidst all this, the campaign to bring surviving Khmer Rouge leaders to justice
proceeded, albeit haltingly.
69
The project was marginalized throughout the 1980s by
US and communist Chinese opposition. The 1998 death of Pol Pot in his jungle exile,
apparently from natural causes, further blunted the impetus, as did messy wrangling
between the United Nations and the Cambodian government over the nature and
composition of any tribunal. In June 2003, however, the two parties came to an
agreement. The Cambodian tribunal was to include “international jurists, lawyers and
judges [who] will occupy key roles as the co-prosecutor, co-investigating judge and
two out of five trial court judges, and must be a party to conviction or exoneration
CAMBODIA AND THE KHMER ROUGE
201
of any accused.”
70
This “mixed tribunal” adds an interesting variant to the quest for
legal justice in cases of genocide (see Chapter 15).
■
FURTHER STUDY
Elizabeth Becker, When the War Was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge
Revolution. New York: Public Affairs, 1998. The most accessible overview of the
Khmer Rouge years.
David P. Chandler, The Tragedy of Cambodian History: Politics, War and Revolution
since 1945. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991. Fine short history.
Tom Fawthrop and Helen Jarvis, Getting Away with Genocide? Cambodia’s Long
Struggle against the Khmer Rouge. London: Pluto Press, 2004. Justice in post-
genocide Cambodia.
Evan R. Gottesman, Cambodia after the Khmer Rouge: Inside the Politics of Nation
Building. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003. Political change and
continuity after the genocide.
Alexander Laban Hinton, Why Did They Kill? Cambodia in the Shadow of Genocide.
Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005. Original and insightful
anthropological analysis, also drawing on social and existential psychology.
Ben Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power and Genocide in Cambodia under the
Khmer Rouge. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996. Detailed study of
the Khmer Rouge years; a sequel to How Pol Pot Came to Power.
Haing Ngor with Roger Warner, A Cambodian Odyssey. New York: Macmillan, 1987.
Lengthy memoir by the Cambodian doctor and genocide survivor who won an
Oscar for playing Dith Pran in The Killing Fields.
William Shawcross, Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia (rev.
edn). New York: Cooper Square Press, 2002. The US air war against Cambodia
and its role in bringing the Khmer Rouge to power.
Loung Ung, First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers.New
York: HarperCollins, 2000. Memoir of a Chinese-Cambodian girl who lived
through the genocide, sampled in this chapter.
Michael Vickery, Cambodia 1975–1982. Boston, MA: South End Press, 1984.
Revisionist study, arguing for an emphasis on local/regional dynamics.
■
NOTES
1 Michael Vickery, Cambodia 1975–1982 (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1984), p. 7.
2 Elizabeth Becker, When the War Was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge Revolution
(New York: Public Affairs, 1998), p. xv. See also Alexander Laban Hinton’s discussion
of a “Cambodian model of disproportionate revenge” in “A Head for an Eye: Revenge in
the Cambodian Genocide,” in Hinton, ed., Genocide: An Anthropological Reader (Malden,
MA: Blackwell, 2002); and Ervin Staub, The Roots of Evil: The Origins of Genocide and
Other Group Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 200–1.
3 David W. Roberts, Political Transition in Cambodia, 1991–1999: Power, Elitism and
Democracy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001), p. 205.
4 Vickery, Cambodia 1975–1982, p. 9.
CAMBODIA AND THE KHMER ROUGE
202
5 Becker, When the War Was Over, p. 37.
6 “Khmer Rouge” (Red Khmers) is actually a label applied derisively to the CPK by
Cambodian President Norodom Sihanouk.
7 Two other members of the core KR group would hold important regional posts under
DK. These were Mok, who would serve as party secretary in the DK’s Southwest Zone,
and carry out a vicious purge of the Northwest Zone in 1977; and Ke Pauk, a key military
leader who directed the Kampuchean army to genocidal ends. A more independent
member of the Paris group, Hou Youn, was purged and killed in 1975, at the dawn of
the DK era, apparently for his opposition to the forced evacuation of Phnom Penh. Ke
Pauk died of natural causes in February 2002. The seminal study of the origins of
Cambodian communism is Ben Kiernan, How Pol Pot Came to Power: Colonialism,
Nationalism, and Communism in Cambodia, 1930–1975 (2nd edn) (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 2004).
8 Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn, The History and Sociology of Genocide (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 1990), p. 400.
9 The Japanese, who invaded and occupied Phnom Penh in 1941, left day-to-day
administration to the local French authority. This was run by the French puppet
government established at Vichy in 1940, following France’s defeat by Nazi Germany.
10 Khieu Thirith quoted in Becker, When the War Was Over, p. 75.
11 Becker, When the War Was Over, p. 87.
12 David P. Chandler, The Tragedy of Cambodian History: Politics, War, and Revolution since
1945 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), p. 108.
13 Chandler, The Tragedy of Cambodian History, p. 205.
14 The coup, invasion, and subsequent bombing campaign are memorably described in
William Shawcross, Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon, and the Destruction of Cambodia (rev. edn)
(New York: Cooper Square Press, 2002).
15 Tom Fawthrop and Helen Jarvis, Getting Away with Genocide? Elusive Justice and
the Khmer Rouge Tribunal (London: Pluto Press, 2004), p. 245. Estimates range from
50–150,000 (Ben Kiernan in The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power and Genocide in Cambodia
under the Khmer Rouge (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996)) to 600,000 or
more (Christopher Hitchens in The Trial of Henry Kissinger).
16 Samantha Power, “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide (New York:
Basic Books, 2002), p. 94.
17 Becker, When the War Was Over, p. 17.
18 In the view of Leo Kuper, “the [Khmer Rouge] government of Kampuchea had every
justification for its indictment of American imperialists. . . . They had left the new rulers
with a most desperate food crisis and the overwhelming task of immediately restoring the
cultivation of rice in a war-shattered country. They bear a heavy responsibility for many
of the subsequent developments under the revolutionary government.” Leo S. Kuper,
Genocide: Its Political Use in the Twentieth Century (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981),
p. 159.
19 Vickery, Cambodia 1975–1982, p. 15. Kiernan cites “one peasant youth [who] recalled
B-52s bombing his village three to six times per day for three months. Over one thousand
people were killed, nearly a third of the population. Afterwards, ‘there were few people
left...and it was quiet.’” Ben Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power and Genocide in
Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 23.
20 Chhit Do quoted in Power, “A Problem from Hell,” pp. 94–95.
21 Ignatieff quoted in Crimes against Humanity, documentary produced by the Imperial War
Museum, London, December 2002 (from the official transcript supplied by the IWM).
22 Becker, When the War Was Over, p. 304. According to Pol Pot, speaking in July
1975: “In the whole world, since the advent of the revolutionary war and since the birth
of US imperialism, no country, no people, and no army has been able to drive the
imperialists out to the last man and score total victory over them [as we have].” This
was “a precious model for the world’s people.” Quoted in Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime,
p. 94.
CAMBODIA AND THE KHMER ROUGE
203
23 Chandler, The Tragedy of Cambodian History, p. 175.
24 On the fate of the tribal peoples, see Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime, pp. 302–9.
25 Cited in Chalk and Jonassohn, The History and Sociology of Genocide, p. 405.
26 Cited in Eric D. Weitz, A Century of Genocide: Utopias of Race and Nation (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), p. 152.
27 “Officials produce statistics; statistics produce officials,” as the Chinese saying has it (cited
in “No Sign of a Landing,” The Economist, January 29, 2005). On the Great Leap
Forward and the famine of 1959–61, see Jasper Becker, Hungry Ghosts: Mao’s Secret
Famine (New York: Henry Holt, 1998); for a concise account, see Jean-Louis Margolin,
“The Greatest Famine in History (1959–1961),” in William L. Hewitt, ed., Defining the
Horrific: Readings on Genocide and Holocaust in the Twentieth Century (Upper Saddle
River, NJ: Pearson, 2004), pp. 211–18.
28 “The borders were closed, foreign embassies and press agencies expelled, newspapers and
television stations shut down, radios confiscated, mail and telephone use suppressed, the
speaking of foreign languages punished.” Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime, p. 9.
29 Fawthrop and Jarvis, Getting Away with Genocide?, p. 94.
30 Becker, When the War Was Over, p. 224.
31 Ben Kiernan and Chanthou Boua, Peasants and Politics in Kampuchea, 1942–1981
(London: Zed Press, 1982), p. 239.
32 The quoted passage is drawn from a posted announcement of “an international and
interdisciplinary academic workshop” titled “Urbicide: The Killing of Cities,” at the
University of Durham, November 24–25, 2005.
33 The first book in English to address the phenomenon of urbicide is Stephen Graham, ed.,
Cities, War, and Terrorism: Towards an Urban Geopolitics (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004). See
especially ch. 7, Martin Shaw, “New Wars of the City: Relationships of ‘Urbicide’ and
‘Genocide’” (an earlier version of which is available at http://www.sussex.ac.uk/Users/
hafa3/city.htm); and ch. 8, Martin Coward, “Urbicide in Bosnia,” also available at
http://www.sussex.ac.uk/Users/mpc20/pubs/urbicide.html.
34 Chandler, The Tragedy of Cambodian History, p. 250.
35 Quoted in Chalk and Jonassohn, The History and Sociology of Genocide, p. 403.
36 Chalk and Jonassohn, The History and Sociology of Genocide, p. 404, emphasis added. The
functions of association and social communication were also targeted in the urbicide.
“Without towns . . . there would be...no human agglomeration facilitating private
communication between individuals. Nowhere that the exchange of news and ideas could
escape tight monitoring that reduced it to a minimum. No venue for a large crowd to
assemble.” Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime, p. 64.
37 Kiernan and Boua, Peasants and Politics in Kampuchea, pp. 345–46. Urban folk, for their
part, “often found it impossible to accept that they had become the servants of dark,
uneducated people.” Chandler, The Tragedy of Cambodian History, p. 243.
38 Loung Ung, First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers (New York:
HarperCollins, 2000), p. 62.
39 Vickery, Cambodia 1975–1982, pp. 66, 286–87, emphasis added. Curiously, Vickery
echoes these prejudices, describing Cambodian urbanites as “spoiled, pretentious,
contentious, status-conscious at worst, or at best simply soft, intriguing, addicted to city
comforts and despising peasant life” (p. 26).
40 Becker, When the War Was Over, p. 137.
41 Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime, p. 212.
42 The statistics are of course subject to dispute. For calculations, see Ben Kiernan,
“The Demography of Genocide in Southeast Asia: The Death Tolls in Cambodia,
1975–79, and East Timor, 1975–80,” Critical Asian Studies, 35: 4 (2003), pp. 586–87.
43 Chandler, The Tragedy of Cambodian History, p. 265.
44 Chandler, The Tragedy of Cambodian History, pp. 270–71.
45 Hinton, Why Did They Kill?, p. 167.
46 Vickery, Cambodia 1975–1982, pp. 68–69, 86.
47 Chandler, The Tragedy of Cambodian History, p. 265.
CAMBODIA AND THE KHMER ROUGE
204
48 Ung, First They Killed My Father, p. 7. The other quotes in this section are drawn from
pp. 12, 18, 38–39, 47, 53, 66, 81, 105, 121.
49 “1978 was the year of hardest work, night and day. We planted from 4 a.m. to 10 a.m.,
then ate a meal. At 1 p.m. we started again, and worked until 5 p.m., and then from 7 to
10 p.m. . . . There was not enough food, and foraging was not allowed.” Testimony cited
in Ben Kiernan, “The Cambodian Genocide – 1975–1979,” in Samuel Totten et al., eds,
Century of Genocide: Eyewitness Accounts and Critical Views (New York: Garland
Publishing, 1997), p. 359.
50 These included valuing children over parents (the young were the “blank slates” of the
revolution); encouraging children to spy on their elders and report “suspicious activities”
to KR cadres; and, in later stages, the outright seizure and sequestering of children to be
raised and indoctrinated by party representatives.
51 Hinton, “A Head for an Eye,” p. 273.
52 Ung quoted in Alexander Laban Hinton, Why Did They Kill? Cambodia in the Shadow of
Genocide (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005), p. 168.
53 The film is an interesting example of popular culture as consciousness-raising (see also
Chapter 16). “In a matter of months The Killing Fields catapulted Cambodia from Cold
War politics to mass culture. Black-pajamaed Khmer Rouge joined the brown-shirted
Nazis as recognizable villains of the twentieth century. The term killing fields became part
of the American vocabulary.” Becker, When the War Was Over, p. 459. Haing Ngor, who
won an Academy Award for playing Dith Pran, wrote in his memoir that until the movie
was released, “relatively few people knew what had happened in Cambodia during the
Khmer Rouge years – intellectuals and Asia experts had, maybe, but not the general
public. The film put the story of those years in terms that everybody could understand.”
Haing Ngor with Roger Warner, A Cambodian Odyssey (New York: Macmillan, 1987),
p. 455. Tragically, Ngor, who had survived four years under the Khmer Rouge, was killed
in a street hold-up in Los Angeles.
54 Pol Pot quoted in Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime, p. 336.
55 Kiernan, “The Cambodian Genocide,” pp. 338–39.
56 Ben Kiernan, “Genocidal Targeting: Two Groups of Victims in Pol Pot’s Cambodia,” in
P. Timothy Bushnell et al., eds, State Organized Terror: The Case of Violent Internal
Repression (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991), pp. 209, 212. In an echo of Nazi
Germany’s labeling of Jews with the Star of David, inhabitants of the Eastern Zone were
outfitted with blue scarves (kromar) that allowed them to be easily identified and
eliminated once deported from the zone (see pp. 213–18).
57 Statistics cited in Fawthrop and Jarvis, Getting Away with Genocide?, p. 245. On Tuol
Sleng, see David Chandler, Voices from S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot’s Secret Prison
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999).
58 Becker, When the War Was Over, p. 254.
59 Sydney Schanberg, “Cambodia,” in Hewitt, ed., Defining the Horrific, p. 261. Ironically,
as Alexander Hinton notes, “the DK regime’s glorification of asceticism, detachment, the
elimination of attachment and desire, renunciation (of material goods and personal
behaviors, sentiments, and attitudes), and purity paralleled prominent Buddhist themes
that were geared toward helping a person attain greater mindfulness.” Hinton, Why Did
They Kill?, p. 197.
60 Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime, p. 458.
61 Kiernan, “Genocidal Targeting,” p. 218.
62 Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime, p. 461.
63 Kiernan, “The Cambodian Genocide,” p. 341.
64 Kiernan, “The Cambodian Genocide,” p. 342.
65 The best account of the Vietnam–Cambodia relationship during the Khmer Rouge era,
and the Vietnamese invasion of 1978–79, is Nayan Chanda, Brother Enemy: The War
after the War (New York: Collier, 1986).
66 Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914–1991 (New York:
Vintage Books, 1994), p. 451.
CAMBODIA AND THE KHMER ROUGE
205
67 Mats Berdal and Michael Leifer, “Cambodia,” in James Mayall, ed., The New
Interventionism, 1991–1994: United Nations Experience in Cambodia, Former Yugoslavia
and Somalia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 36.
68 Nicholas Wheeler, Saving Strangers: Humanitarian Intervention in International Society
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 84.
69 For a fine overview of the twisted course of justice in Cambodia, see “A Case Study: The
Atrocities of the Khmer Rouge,” Part III in Steven R. Ratner and Jason S. Abrams,
Accountability for Human Rights Atrocities in International Law: Beyond the Nuremberg
Legacy (2nd edn) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 267–328.
70 Fawthrop and Jarvis, Getting Away with Genocide?, p. 240.
CAMBODIA AND THE KHMER ROUGE
206
BOX 7A EAST TIMOR
East Timor’s tragic road to independence began the same year – 1975 – that
the Khmer Rouge took power in Cambodia. For four years thereafter, events
in these two Southeast Asian lands moved in grim tandem. Both witnessed
genocides as severe, in terms of proportion of population killed, as any since
the Jewish Holocaust. The Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia became a
byword for ideological fanaticism and the brutal exercise of power, sparking
international condemnation. In contrast, the genocide in East Timor was
protested and publicized only by a small group of Timorese exiles, human rights
activists, and concerned scholars.
1
Unlike the Cambodian genocide, it con-
tinued until 1999, when both cases finally drew the attention of international
prosecutors.
In the 1990s, as Indonesian atrocities continued, the Timor solidarity
movement grew. The global network it established was the key ingredient in
confronting the final blast of Indonesian genocide, in 1999, aiming to overturn
a pro-independence referendum result. East Timor thus offers an inspiring
example of a genocide ended, in large part, by popular mobilization and
protest.
East Timor owes its distinctiveness from the rest of the island of Timor,
and the Indonesian archipelago as a whole, to its colonization by the Portuguese
in the mid-seventeenth century. The division of the island between the
Portuguese and Dutch was formalized in 1915. During the Second World War,
the colonial regime gave way to Japanese occupation. This spawned the first
large-scale resistance movement in East Timor, assisted by Australian troops.
When Australia abandoned the territory, the Timorese were left at the mercy
of the Japanese, who slaughtered an estimated 60,000 of them – 13 percent
of the entire population. (Notably, some of the most powerful calls in the
1975–99 period for solidarity with East Timor came from Australian Second
World War veterans, who recalled the solidarity the Timorese had shown them.)
After the war, the Dutch East Indies became the independent Republic of
Indonesia. Portugal, meanwhile, re-established control over East Timor. But in
April 1974, a left-wing military coup against the fascist government in Lisbon
CAMBODIA AND THE KHMER ROUGE
207
established a democratic government, leading Portugal rapidly to retreat from
its overseas empire (including Angola and Mozambique). Indigenous political
parties sprang up in East Timor, and elections for a National Constituent
Assembly were set for 1976, with full independence anticipated three years
later.
By 1975, the leading political force in the territory was Fretilin (the
Revolutionary Front of Independent East Timor), which had established
strong grass-roots support throughout the countryside. In 1975, Fretilin won
village-level elections over its main competitor, the Timorese Democratic Union
(UDT). Disaffected UDT members, responding to Indonesian machinations,
refused to accept the result. Their abortive coup was quickly crushed, with
60 mi
60 km
N
Dili
Baukau
Pantar
Lombien
Semau
Roti
Alor
Wetar
Atauro
Romang
Kisar
Moa
Silvicola
Timor Sea
Vikeke
Banda Sea
Savu Sea
EAST TIMOR
Indonesia
TIMOR
10º S
125º E
Map 7a.1 East Timor
Source: Map provided by WorldAtlas.com
CAMBODIA AND THE KHMER ROUGE
208
a death-toll of several thousand. The UDT leadership fled to Indonesia, and
Fretilin issued a declaration of independence on November 28, 1975.
Just over a week later, on December 7 – after receiving the green light from
the US – the Indonesians launched a massive invasion of East Timor by land,
sea, and air. In the largest city, Dili, the Indonesian military murdered thousands
of Timorese in mass executions. Fretilin forces were driven into the mountainous
interior. Over the following years, tens of thousands of Timorese civilians would
join them, preferring isolation in dismal conditions to Indonesian violence and
repression.
With Dili and secondary towns under their control, Indonesian forces fanned
out across the territory. Massacres occurred almost everywhere they went.
Families of suspected Fretilin supporters were annihilated along with the
suspects themselves. In many cases, entire village populations were targeted for
extermination. This strategy reached its apogee in the Aitana region in July
1981, where “a ghastly massacre . . . murdered everyone, from tiny babies to the
elderly, unarmed people who were not involved in the fighting but were there
simply because they had stayed with Fretilin and wanted to live freely in the
mountains.”
2
Perhaps 10,000 Timorese died in this killing spree alone.
The atrocities continued on a smaller scale throughout the 1980s. At Malim
Luro in August 1983, for example, “after plundering the population of all their
belongings, [Indonesian troops] firmly tied up men, women and children,
numbering more than sixty people. They made them lie on the ground and
then drove a bulldozer over them, and then used it to place a few centimetres
of earth on top of the totally crushed corpses.”
3
Survivors of the various rampages were imprisoned under the vigilant
gaze of Indonesian soldiers and local paramilitaries. Disease, starvation, and
forced labor caused many deaths. The territories not under full Indonesian
control also suffered genocide. Indonesian forces launched repeated scorched-
earth sorties; rained bombs on civilian populations; and imposed a strict
blockade on Fretilin-held areas that led, as designed, to starvation. According
to Timor specialist John Taylor, tens of thousands of Timorese died as a result
of this war of “encirclements, bombing, uprooting of the population, malnu-
trition and generalized brutalities.”
4
In total, an estimated 170,000 Timorese
– “24 to 26 percent of East Timor’s 1975 population” – died between 1975 and
1999.
5
With the international community’s acceptance of Indonesia’s “new order,”
6
it seemed unlikely that the independence movement could survive, let alone
emerge victorious. In the 1990s, however, Indonesia’s hold weakened. On
November 12, 1991, some 270 civilians were slaughtered by Indonesian troops
in Dili’s Santa Cruz cemetery. Witnessed by several foreign observers, who
managed to escape with film footage, the Dili Massacre provoked the first
substantial international outcry against genocide in East Timor. The territory’s
profile was raised further in 1996, when the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to
the leader of the East Timor Catholic Church, Bishop Belo, and Fretilin’s leader
CAMBODIA AND THE KHMER ROUGE
209
in exile, José Ramos Horta. Meanwhile, taking advantage of new Internet
technologies, the international Timorese solidarity movement – now led by the
East Timor Action Network (ETAN) – organized demonstrations and lobbied
governments to condemn Indonesian repression.
A dramatic transformation within Indonesia catalyzed the final drive for
independence. In 1998, with Indonesia suffering an economic crisis, General
Suharto, the long-time military dictator, resigned and handed power to his vice-
president, B.J. Habibie. Habibie stunned the world by announcing, in January
1999, that Indonesia was willing to “let East Timor go” if its people chose
independence in a referendum. The United Nations, with Portugal taking the
lead, rapidly announced a plebiscite, eventually scheduled for August 30.
Behind the scenes, the Indonesian military – which had amassed huge
economic holdings in East Timor over the previous twenty-five years – prepared
to sabotage the independence process. It relied on locally raised paramilitary
forces (the so-called ninjas), overseen by the elite Kopassus army unit, to terrorize
the population into voting to stay with Indonesia. In the prelude to the
plebiscite, hundreds of Timorese, especially activist youth, were murdered by
death squads or in local-level massacres.
7
Despite these atrocities, the UN
fatefully chose to leave “security” for the referendum in the hands of the
Indonesian army.
The stage was thus set for the violence and destruction unleashed at the end
of August 1999. Voting peacefully and in overwhelming numbers, 78.5 percent
of Timorese opted for independence. The Indonesian military and its local allies
swung immediately into action. As international observers looked on in horror,
and the UN hunkered down in its headquarters, militia killed unknown
numbers of Timorese. (A regularly cited figure is 1,500, but this may be a
substantial undercount.)
8
Indonesian troops and their local militia forces burned
swathes of territory and entire city neighborhoods to the ground, in a campaign
aimed at “the virtual demolition of the physical basis for survival in the
territory.”
9
The UN then decided to evacuate staff from its Dili compound, and leave
the terrified Timorese gathered there to their fate. This craven action was only
avoided by an unprecedented staff rebellion against the edict.
10
Meanwhile,
hundreds of thousands of demonstrators took to the streets in North America,
Europe, and Australia, bringing sustained pressure to bear on their govern-
ments.
11
With memories of Rwanda and Bosnia (see chapters 8–9) doubtless
reverberating in his mind, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan issued a strongly
worded warning to Indonesia. The Clinton administration in the US also
announced that it was prepared to suspend the military aid on which the
Indonesian armed forces depended. The Australian government, for its part,
offered to lead a stabilization force to occupy and patrol the territory. Faced with
this concerted opposition, the Indonesian government backed down. Australian
forces deployed in Dili on September 20; a week later, Indonesia ceded control
to the international contingent.
CAMBODIA AND THE KHMER ROUGE
210
East Timor became the world’s newest nation two years later, in August
2001. The happy ending, however, was undermined by material and human
devastation, spiralling unemployment, and social dislocation.
12
Meanwhile,
only the most cursory investigation was launched into atrocities during the
plebiscite period and its aftermath. By contrast with the hundreds of forensic
investigators dispatched to Kosovo after the 1999 war there (Chapter 8), fewer
than a dozen were allotted to East Timor, and only for a short period. As a result,
no clear picture of the scale of the Indonesian-directed killing has yet emerged.
As for military commander General Wiranto and his cohorts, who oversaw
“Operation Clean Sweep,” punishment proved elusive. Newly democratic
Indonesia pledged to administer it, but The Economist reported in August 2004
that “of the 16 members of the Indonesian security forces and two East Timorese
civilians who were indicted [by Indonesian courts], all the Indonesians have
either been acquitted or freed on appeal,” while the Timorese received light
punishments. Impunity ruled, but the East Timorese government was reluctant
to press the matter with “its vast and powerful neighbour.”
13
Controversially,
it opposed the creation of an international tribunal to prosecute those
responsible for the atrocities.
■
FURTHER STUDY
Peter Carey and G. Carter Bentley, eds, East Timor at the Crossroads: The Forging
of a Nation. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 1995. Essays on the
Timorese independence struggle.
Tim Fischer, Seven Days in East Timor: Ballots and Bullets. London: Allen &
Unwin, 2000. Eyewitness account of the 1999 independence plebiscite.
Matthew Jardine, East Timor: Genocide in Paradise. Berkeley, CA: Odonian
Press, 1999. A succinct introduction.
Joseph Nevins, A Not-so-distant Horror: Mass Violence in East Timor. Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 2005. A recent and decent work, good on the
post-1999 quest for justice.
John G. Taylor, East Timor: The Price of Freedom. London: Zed Books, 2000.
The best all-round study, with a chronology.
■
NOTES
1 Among the academic voices were Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman. In a
classic 1979 study, they compared the outraged news coverage devoted to
Cambodia with the near-total media blackout on East Timor. Victims of the
communist Khmer Rouge were “worthy victims,” they wrote ironically, while the
East Timorese – whose tormentor, Indonesia, was a valued Western ally – were
deemed “unworthy,” and thus consigned to oblivion. Chomsky and Herman, The
American Connection and Third World Fascism, Vol. 1 of The Political Economy of
Human Rights (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1979).
CAMBODIA AND THE KHMER ROUGE
211
2 Source cited in John G. Taylor, East Timor: The Price of Freedom (London: Zed
Books, 2000), p. 118. See also Taylor’s fine chapter, “‘Encirclement and
Annihilation’: The Indonesian Occupation of East Timor,” in Robert Gellately and
Ben Kiernan, eds, The Specter of Genocide: Mass Murder in Historical Perspective
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 163–85.
3 Source cited in Taylor, East Timor, p. 103. Together with indiscriminate, “root-
and-branch” massacres of this type, a pattern of gendercidal killings of males was
also evident, as it would be after the independence referendum in 1999. For a
detailed investigation, see Adam Jones/Gendercide Watch, “Case Study: East
Timor, 1975–99,” http://www.gendercide.org/case_timor.html, from which part
of this box text is adapted.
4 Taylor, East Timor, p. 151.
5 Ben Kiernan, “The Demography of Genocide in Southeast Asia: The Death Tolls
in Cambodia, 1975–79, and East Timor, 1975–80,” Critical Asian Studies, 35: 4
(2003), p. 594, citing research by Gabriel Defert.
6 According to Joseph Nevins, “Although there were numerous and diverse reasons
for the various countries’ support for Jakarta, the principal rationale was simple:
Indonesia was a populous country with great market potential and a very wealthy
resource base and occupied a strategic location.” Nevins, A Not-so-distant Horror:
Mass Violence in East Timor (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), p. 77.
7 Nevins, A Not-so-distant Horror, p. 83.
8 See, e.g., Ellen Nakashima, “For Survivors of E. Timor Massacres, Justice Still
Elusive,” Washington Post, September 16, 2005. For an examination of the physical,
eyewitness, and circumstantial evidence pertaining to the Timorese death-toll in
1999, see Jones/Gendercide Watch, “Case Study: East Timor.”
9 Noam Chomsky, “East Timor Is Not Yesterday’s Story,” ZNet, October 23, 1999.
10 A heart-stopping depiction of these events, by someone who lived through the
tension-racked days in the UN compound, is Geoffrey Robinson, “‘If You Leave
Us Here, We Will Die,’” ch. 10 in Nicolaus Mills and Kira Brunner, eds, The New
Killing Fields: Massacre and the Politics of Intervention (New York: Basic Books,
2002), pp. 159–83.
11 The fact that the Timor events followed closely on the war in Kosovo (March–June
1999), which had prompted Western intervention, added to the pressure on
governments – an interesting case of “norm grafting” (see Chapter 12).
12 “More than five years [after the Indonesian withdrawal] many public facilities still
lie in ruins, much of the country’s social infrastructure is below pre-September 1999
levels, and unemployment and underemployment are massive as a result of the very
low levels of economic development.” Nevins, A Not-so-distant Horror, p. 206.
13 “Above the Law,” The Economist, August 14, 2004. Progress has, however, been
made by the Serious Crimes Unit within East Timor, established with UN help.
“This body has indicted some 375 people and secured more than 50 convictions.
Most of those convicted are militiamen who say they were acting under the orders
of the Indonesian armed forces. About 280 indictees remain at large in Indonesia.
They include the Indonesian commander at the time, General Wiranto, for whom
the unit has issued an arrest warrant,” though the Timorese government (!) refused
to forward it to Interpol (ibid.). It is notable that all of the accusations and legal
initiatives pertain to the 1999 atrocities; even leading human rights organizations
such as Amnesty International have declined to recommend prosecutions for the
genocide committed against Timorese over the previous quarter-century. See
Nevins, A Not-so-distant Horror, p. 165.
Bosnia and Kosovo
The dissolution of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s brought genocide back to Europe
after nearly half a century. During those years the world looked on, shocked but
ineffectual, as the multiethnic state of Bosnia-Herzegovina collapsed into genocidal
war. The most extensive and systematic atrocities were committed by Serbs against
Muslims, but clashes between Croatians and Serbs, and between Muslims and
Croatians, claimed thousands of lives. The restive Serb province of Kosovo, with its
ethnic-Albanian majority, was another tinder-box, though mass violence did not
erupt there until spring 1999.
■
ORIGINS AND ONSET
Yugoslavia, the federation of “Southern Slavs,” was cobbled together from the disin-
tegrated Ottoman Empire after the First World War. Fragile federations everywhere
are prone to violence in times of crisis, as a glance around the contemporary world
confirms (Russia, Indonesia, Iraq). For Yugoslavia, the crisis came in the Second
World War, when the federation was riven by combined Nazi invasion and genocidal
intercommunal conflict. Yugoslavia in fact became one of the most destructive
theaters of history’s most destructive war. Under the German occupation regime
in Serbia and the fascist Ustashe government installed by the Nazis in Croatia, most
of Yugoslavia’s Jewish population was wiped out. Hundreds of thousands of Croatian
Serbs were rounded up by the Ustashe and slaughtered, most notoriously at the
Jasenovac death camp.
212
CHAPTER 8
Muslims in Bosnia mostly collaborated with the Nazis, earning them the enduring
enmity of the Serb population. The Serbs themselves were divided between the
Chetniks, who supported the deposed royalist regime, and a partisan movement led
by Josip Broz, known then and after as Tito. Chetnik massacres and widespread
atrocities prompted an equally murderous response from Tito’s forces. After the
partisans seized power in the Yugoslav capital, Belgrade, in the late stages of the war,
thousands of Chetniks fled to neighboring countries. The majority were returned to
Yugoslavia to face extrajudicial punishment. Throughout 1945–46, Tito’s forces killed
tens of thousands of Chetniks and other political opponents.
The socialist state that Tito instituted, however, was comparatively liberal by the
standards of Central and Eastern Europe. Yugoslavs enjoyed extensive freedom of
movement and travel. Millions worked overseas, especially in Germany. The country
gained a reputation not only for comparative openness, but also for successful ethnic
pluralism. Tito, a Croatian, worked to ensure that no ethnic group dominated the
federation. Political mobilization along ethnic lines was banned (resulting in a wave
of detention and imprisonment in the 1970s, when Croatian leaders within the
Yugoslav Socialist Party sought greater autonomy for Croatia). State authorities
worked hard to defuse ethnic tensions and generate an overarching Yugoslav identity,
with some success.
But Tito died in May 1980, and his multinational federation began rapidly
to unravel amidst pervasive economic strife. A weak collective leadership faltered
when confronted by an emergent generation of ethnonationalist politicians, most
prominently Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia and Franjo Tudjman in Croatia. Tudjman,
“a small-minded, right-wing autocrat,”
1
led a political movement – the HDZ – that
explicitly revived Ustashe symbolism and rhetoric. He also allowed, and probably
supervised, a campaign of harassment and violence against the large Serbian
population of the Krajina region. Serbs were dismissed from their jobs, allegedly to
redress preferential treatment granted to them in the past. Worse would follow.
In Milosevic of Serbia, meanwhile, we see one of the most influential European
politicians of the second half the twentieth century – albeit a malign influence.
Milosevic, though, was not especially talented or charismatic. Rather, he was a classic
apparatchik (child of the system) who realized sooner than most that rousing nation-
alist passions was the best way to exploit the Yugoslav upheavals.
2
Milosevic sowed the seeds for genocide in April 1987, on a visit to the restive
Albanian-dominated province of Kosovo. (Ironically, it was over Kosovo that the term
“genocide” was first deployed in a contemporary Balkans context – by Serbs, to
describe their people’s supposed destiny there at the hands of the Albanian majority.)
3
Dispatched by Serb President Ivan Stambolic, his mentor, to undertake talks with
the local Communist Party leadership, Milosevic was greeted by a rowdy outpour-
ing of Serbs barely kept in check by police. Rocks were thrown, apparently as a
provocation. The police reacted with batons. Milosevic was urged to calm the crowd.
Instead, he told them: “No one should dare to beat you,” “unwittingly coining a
modern Serb rallying call.”
4
Transformed by the ecstatic reaction to his speech, Milosevic forged ahead with his
nationalist agenda. A few months later, in September 1987, he shunted aside his
mentor, Ivan Stambolic, and took over the presidency. In 1989, Serbs initiated a
BOSNIA AND KOSOVO
213
repressive drive in Kosovo that ended the province’s autonomy within Serbia, threw
tens of thousands of ethnic Albanians out of their jobs, and made of Kosovo “one large
militia camp ...asqualid outpost of putrefying colonialism.”
5
In retrospect, this was
the key event that unraveled Yugoslavia. After the Kosovo crackdown, no ethnic group
could feel entirely safe in a Serb-dominated federation.
In 1991–92, Yugoslavia exploded into open war. On June 25, 1991, Croatia and
Slovenia declared themselves independent. A surreal ten-day war for Slovenia resulted
in the withdrawal of the Yugoslav Army (JNA) and the abandonment of Yugoslav
claims to the territory. Croatia, though, was a different matter. It included sizable Serb
populations in Krajina (the narrow strip of territory running adjacent to the
Dalmatian coast and bordering Serb-dominated areas of Bosnia-Herzegovina) and
Eastern Slavonia.
BOSNIA AND KOSOVO
214
60 mi
60 km
N
Bosna
River
Danube
River
Sava
River
Vrbas
River
Neretua
River
Maglic
Banja Luka
Jajce
Bosanki
Brod
Brcko
Prijedor
Bihac
BOSNIA & HERZ.
LOW/HILLS/MOUNTAINS
Bosnia
and
Herzegovina
Croatia
Croatia
Serbia
and
Montenegro
Adriatic
Sea
Doboj
Zenica
Gorazde
Mostar
D
a
l
m
a
t
i
a
n
C
o
a
s
t
Sarajevo
Map 8.1 Bosnia
Source: Map provided by WorldAtlas.com
Milosevic recognized the inevitability of Croatia’s secession, but sought to secure
territories in which Serbs were strongly represented for his “Greater Serbia.” In
December 1991, after several months of fighting, the Krajina Serbs declared their
independence from Croatia. Meanwhile, the world’s attention was captured by the
artillery bombardment of the historic port of Dubrovnik; less so by the far more severe
JNA assault on Vukovar, which reduced the city to rubble and was followed by the
genocidal slaughter of some 200 wounded Croatian soldiers in their hospital beds.
The independence declarations by Slovenia and Croatia left multiethnic Bosnia-
Herzegovina in an impossible position. As epitomized by its major city, Sarajevo –
hitherto a model of ethnic tolerance – Bosnia was divided among Muslims, Serbs, and
Croatians. Attempting to leave Yugoslavia would surely mean war by Bosnian Serbs
to integrate “their” zone of Bosnia into Milosevic’s Greater Serbia, while remaining
within the federation meant enduring Serb domination. In February 1992, Bosnia-
Herzegovina declared independence from Yugoslavia. Bosnian Serbs immediately
declared independence from Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Bosnia then became the most brutal battlefield of the Balkan wars. Serb gunners
began an artillery assault on Sarajevo that evoked outrage around the world, con-
veniently distracting international attention from much greater atrocities elsewhere
in Bosnia, especially in the industrialized east.
6
The Yugoslav army was ordered out,
but left most of its weapons in the hands of Bosnian Serbs, who now constituted a
formidable 80,000-man army. Bosnian Muslims, hampered by their land-locked
territory and limited resources, were in many places simply crushed by Serb forces.
Then – from early 1993 – they found themselves fighting their former Croatian allies
as well, in a war nearly as vicious as the Serb–Muslim confrontation. Not surprisingly,
the Muslims responded by generating “a strident, xenophobic Muslim nationalism”
mirroring that of their tormentors.
7
However, neither it nor its Croatian counterpart
ever matched Serb nationalism in destructiveness. An in-depth United Nations report
subsequently ascribed 90 percent of atrocities in Bosnia-Herzegovina to Serbs, and
just 10 percent to Croatians and Muslims combined.
8
In August 1992, Western reporters broke the story of Serb-run concentration
camps in Bosnia where Muslim males, and some females, were detained.
9
At Omarska,
the grimmest of the camps, “there were routine and constant beatings; in the dor-
mitories, on the way to and from the canteen or the latrines, all the time. The guards
used clubs, thick electrical cable, rifle butts, fists, boots, brass knuckle-dusters, iron
rods....Every night, after midnight, the guards called out the names of one or more
prisoners. These prisoners were taken out and beaten bloody, their bones often broken
and their skin punctured.”
10
Thousands died; of the survivors, Penny Marshall of
ITN wrote that they were reduced to “various stages of human decay and affliction;
the bones of their elbows and wrists protrude like pieces of jagged stone from the
pencil thin stalks to which their arms have been reduced.”
11
Such images, reminis-
cent of Nazi concentration camps, sparked an international uproar. Combined with
revelations of mass executions and the rape of Bosnian-Muslim women, the camps
spawned the first widespread use of the term “genocide” in a Balkans context.
BOSNIA AND KOSOVO
215
■
GENDERCIDE AND GENOCIDE IN BOSNIA
The strategy of “ethnic cleansing,” as it rapidly came to be known in Western media
and public discussion, was meant to ensure not only military victory and the
expulsion of target populations, but also a permanent post-genocide arrangement.
As Laura Silber and Alan Little argue, “the technique . . . was designed to render the
territory ethnically pure, and to make certain, by instilling a hatred and fear that
would endure, that Muslims and Serbs could never again live together.”
12
Central to this policy was killing civilians, overwhelmingly men of “battle age.”
The war in Bosnia-Herzegovina offers one of the most vivid modern instances of
gendercide, or gender-selective mass killing, discussed in comparative context in
Chapter 13. As with most cases of gendercide, the gender variable interacted with
those of age and community prominence to produce a genocidal outcome in Bosnia
(and again in Kosovo in 1999). Journalist Mark Danner described the modus operandi
of Serb forces as follows:
1. Concentration. Surround the area to be cleansed and after warning the resident
Serbs – often they are urged to leave or are at least told to mark their houses with
white flags – intimidate the target population with artillery fire and arbitrary
executions and then bring them out into the streets.
2. Decapitation. Execute political leaders and those capable of taking their places:
lawyers, judges, public officials, writers, professors.
3. Separation. Divide women, children, and old men from men of “fighting age”
– sixteen years to sixty years old.
4. Evacuation. Transport women, children, and old men to the border, expelling
them into a neighboring territory or country.
5. Liquidation. Execute “fighting age” men, dispose of bodies.
13
Throughout the Bosnian war, this strategy was implemented in systematic fashion
– primarily, but not only, by Serb military and paramilitary forces. The Srebrenica
slaughter of July 1995 is by far the most destructive instance of gendercidal killing
in the Balkans; but there are dozens of more quotidian examples. Some are cited in
a short section of the Helsinki Watch report, War Crimes in Bosnia-Hercegovina,
covering the first and most murderous phase of the war:
In my village, about 180 men were killed. The army put all men in the center of
the village. After the killing, the women took care of the bodies and identified
them. The older men buried the bodies. (Trnopolje)
The army came to the village that day. They took us from our houses. The men
were beaten. The army came in on trucks and started shooting at the men and
killing them. (Prnovo)
The army took most of the men and killed them. There were bodies everywhere.
(Rizvanovici)
BOSNIA AND KOSOVO
216
Our men had to hide. My husband was with us, but hiding. I saw my uncle being
beaten on July 25 when there was a kind of massacre. The Serbs were searching
for arms. Three hundred men were killed that day. (Carakovo)
14
Six years after the war ended, “of the approximately 18,000 persons registered by the
ICRC in Bosnia-Herzegovina as still missing in connection with the armed conflict
. . . 92% are men and 8% are women.”
15
As in Armenia in 1915, with community males murdered or incarcerated, Serb
soldiers and paramilitaries were better able to inflict atrocities on remaining com-
munity members. Women, especially younger ones, were special targets. They were
subject to rape, often repeatedly, often by gangs, and often in the presence of a father
or husband. Typical was the testimony offered by “E.,” just 16 years old:
Several Chetniks arrived. One, a man around 30, ordered me to follow him into
the house. I had to go. He started looking for money, jewelry and other valuables.
He wanted to know where the men were. I didn’t answer. Then he ordered me to
undress. I was terribly afraid. I took off my clothes, feeling that I was falling apart.
The feeling seemed under my skin; I was dying, my entire being was murdered.
BOSNIA AND KOSOVO
217
Figure 8.1 Gendercide in Bosnia: a mass grave of Srebrenica victims from the Branjevo farm near Pilica village, unearthed by
forensic investigators. A member of the forensic team, Fernando Moscoso, said: “Constantly seeing their faces, their arms and
legs contorted and twisted over one another, that’s what really gets to you. At night, when I close my eyes I still see them.”
Source: Magnum Photos/Gilles Peress.
I closed my eyes, I couldn’t look at him. He hit me. I fell. Then he lay on me. He
did it to me. I cried, twisted my body convulsively, bled. I had been a virgin.
He went out and invited two Chetniks to come in. I cried. The two repeated
what the first one had done to me. I felt lost. I didn’t even know when they left.
I don’t know how long I stayed there, lying on the floor alone, in a pool of blood.
My mother found me. I couldn’t imagine anything worse. I had been raped,
destroyed and terribly hurt. But for my mother this was the greatest sorrow of
our lives. We both cried and screamed. She dressed me.
I would like to be a mother some day. But how? In my world, men represent
terrible violence and pain. I cannot control that feeling.
16
It was in the Bosnian context that the term “genocidal rape” was minted, stressing
the centrality of sexual assaults of women to the broader campaign of “cleansing.” It
should be noted that men and adolescent boys were also sexually assaulted and
tortured on a large scale in detention facilities such as Omarska and Trnopolje.
17
BOSNIA AND KOSOVO
218
■
BOX 8.1 ONE MAN’S STORY: NEZAD AVDIC
July 1995. For three years, the city of Srebrenica, with its majority Bosnian-Muslim
population, had been one of the major conflict points of the war in Bosnia-
Herzegovina. In April 1993, with Srebrenica on the verge of falling to Bosnian Serb
forces, the United Nations oversaw the evacuation of children, women, and the
elderly, while abiding by Serb demands that no males of “battle age” be permitted
to leave. It then declared Srebrenica a UN-protected “safe haven.” This status held
for a little over two years, under the watchful gaze of first Canadian, then Dutch
peacekeepers. The population experienced ever-greater hunger and material
deprivation. It also fell under the sway of Naser Oric, a Muslim paramilitary leader
who organized murderous raids out of the enclave against Serb civilians in
surrounding villages.
18
Finally, on July 6 1995, the Bosnian Serbs decided to implement their “endgame.”
19
Serb General Ratko Mladic promised his men a “feast”: “There will be blood up
to your knees.”
20
The peacekeepers watched without firing a shot as the
Serbs overcame light Bosnian-Muslim resistance and rounded up most of the
population.
Understanding immediately that they were at mortal risk, thousands of “battle-age”
men sought to flee through the surrounding hills to Muslim-controlled territory. Most
were killed in the hills, or massacred en masse after capture. The men who remained
behind, including elderly and adolescent males, were systematically separated from
the children and women, who – as in 1993 – were allowed to flee in buses to safety.
The captured males were trucked off to be slaughtered.
■
THE INTERNATIONAL DIMENSION
If the caliber of the political leadership on all sides of the Balkan wars left much
to be desired, the same may be said of international policy-making, beginning
with Germany’s machinations over Croatian and Slovenian independence. Animated
by a vision of expanding economic and political influence, Germany – led by
its foreign minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher – pressed the rest of the European
Union to support the dissolution of Yugoslavia. The campaign was fiercely opposed
by British representative Lord Carrington, whose plan to safeguard peace in the
Balkans depended upon a carrot of recognition being extended to the nascent states
in return for guarantees of safeguards for minorities. Bosnian Muslim leader Alija
BOSNIA AND KOSOVO
219
Nezad Avdic, a 17-year-old Bosnian Muslim, was among the intended victims.
“When the truck stopped, we immediately heard shooting outside,” he recalled.
“The Chetniks [Serb paramilitaries] told us to get out, five at a time. I was in the
middle of the group, and the men in front didn’t want to get out. They were terrified,
they started pulling back. But we had no choice, and when it was my turn to get
out with five others, I saw dead bodies everywhere.”
Avdic was lined up in front of a mass grave. “We stood in front of the Chetniks
with our backs turned to them. They ordered us to lie down, and as I threw myself
on the ground, I heard gunfire. I was hit in my right arm and three bullets went
through the right side of my torso. I don’t recall whether or not I fell on the ground
unconscious. But I remember being frightened, thinking I would soon be dead or
another bullet would hit. I thought it would soon be all over.”
Lying among wounded men, “hear[ing] others screaming and moaning,” Avdic
maintained his deathlike pose. “One of the Chetniks ordered the others to check
and see what bodies were still warm. ‘Put a bullet through all the heads, even if
they’re cold.’” But his partner replied: “Fuck their mothers! They’re all dead.”
21
They weren’t. “I heard a truck leave,” Avdic said. “I didn’t know what to do....I
saw someone moving about ten metres away from me and asked, ‘Friend, are you
alive?’”
With his companion, Avdic managed to flee the scene after Serb forces departed.
He was one of a tiny handful of survivors of a connected series of genocidal
massacres that claimed more than 7,000 lives. This made Srebrenica the worst
slaughter in Europe since the killings of political opponents by Yugoslav partisan
forces after the Second World War. Srebrenica was also the crowning genocidal
massacre of the Balkan wars of the 1990s – but not, unfortunately, the final one.
The Serb assault on Kosovo, with its ethnic-Albanian majority, would follow in 1999,
with scenes that echoed Srebrenica, though on a smaller scale.
Izetbegovic desperately tried to head off a German/EU declaration of support,
while UN Secretary-General Perez de Cuellar warned Genscher that recognizing
Croatia would unleash “the most terrible war” in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
22
The efforts
were to no avail, and German/EU recognition was duly granted in May 1992. Many
see this as an important spur to the genocide unleashed across Bosnia in ensuing
months.
The pivotal role of the United States was characterized by vacillation on the
independence issue, guided by a conviction that “we don’t have a dog in this fight”
(George Bush Sr.’s Secretary of State, James Baker, speaking in 1992). The besieging
of Srebrenica and other Muslim-majority cities in Bosnia in spring 1993 forced a
US-led response to establish six “safe areas” under UN protection, but these were
never effectively defended. When Srebrenica fell to the Serbs, it was “protected” by
fewer than 400 Dutch peacekeepers, mostly lightly armed and under orders not to
fire their weapons except in self-defense. Genocidal massacres were the predictable
result. Suspicion has swirled that, mass atrocities aside, the US and EU were not
unhappy to see the “safe areas” fall to the Serbs. (An unnamed US official stated at
the time that “While losing the enclaves has been unfortunate for Bosnia, it’s been
great for us.”)
23
The Americans and Europeans turned a blind eye to Croatia’s rearmament, which
violated the arms embargo formally imposed on all sides. The US also forged a “tacit
agreement to allow Iran and other Moslem countries to expand covert arms supplies
to the Bosnians.”
24
A month after Srebrenica fell, the Croatians combined with
Muslim forces to launch Operation Storm, a dramatic offensive against the Serb-
held Krajina region.
25
Milosevic, once the Bosnian Serbs’ ardent champion, now
abandoned them, the better to present himself as a Balkans peacemaker, and secure
the lifting of economic sanctions.
In a matter of days, the Croatian-Muslim offensive overran Krajina, resulting in
“another biblical movement of people” as up to 200,000 Serbs fled to Serb-populated
regions of Bosnia.
26
Croatian President Tudjman celebrated the expulsions, declaring
that the country’s Serbs had “disappeared ignominiously, as if they had never popu-
lated this land.”
27
The Krajina fait accompli left in its wake Europe’s largest refugee
population, but it was welcomed in the West, especially by the US.
28
In the aftermath,
the Clinton government invited the warring parties to talks at Wright-Patterson Air
Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. They resulted in the signing of a comprehensive peace
agreement (the Dayton Accords) in November 1995, and the introduction of 60,000
NATO peacekeepers to police it.
However, there was still a final genocidal act to be played out in Milosevic’s
campaign for a Greater Serbia – in Kosovo, the Serb province where his nationalist
drive had begun.
■
KOSOVO, 1998–99
To counter the Serb police state imposed in 1989, a parallel political structure arose
in Kosovar Albanian communities, built around the non-violent resistance movement
led by Ibrahim Rugova. Remarkably, this parallel authority managed to preserve
BOSNIA AND KOSOVO
220
Albanian-language education and a semblance of social services for otherwise
dispossessed ethnic Albanians.
Eventually, after nearly a decade of “a system of apartheid that excluded the
province’s majority Albanian population from virtually every phase of political,
economic, social, and cultural life,”
29
an armed guerrilla movement – the Kosovo
Liberation Army (KLA) – launched attacks in 1997. Many KLA leaders desired the
political union of Kosovo’s Albanians with their “compatriots” across the border in
Albania proper. Guerrilla war through 1998 and into 1999 resulted in the Serb killing
of hundreds of ethnic-Albanian civilians, and the internal displacement of 200,000
more. Milosevic now began to plan a decisive resolution of the Kosovo quandary.
“In a long career, this would be his masterpiece, cleansing the Serb homeland of its
Albanian interlopers in a matter of weeks.”
30
European countries sought to head off full-scale war, dispatching an observer
team (the Kosovo Verification Commission) to monitor a ceasefire between the Serbs
and the KLA. Both sides were guilty of violations, but the mass murder by Serb para-
militaries of dozens of Kosovar men at the village of Racak (January 16, 1999) sparked
the greatest outrage. Abortive negotiations under Western auspices at Rambouillet,
France, ended in impasse and acrimony. Pro-Serb commentators have accused
Western countries, in league with the KLA, of stage-managing a crisis at Rambouillet
in order to discipline Milosevic with a quick military defeat.
31
It did not turn out that way. On March 19, 1999, the Serbs launched “a massive
campaign of ethnic cleansing, aimed not only at tipping the demographic balance
[of Kosovo] in Belgrade’s favor but also – by driving hundreds of thousands of
desperate Albanians over the border into the fragile neighboring states of Macedonia
and Albania – at threatening the Western allies with the destabilization of the entire
Balkan peninsula.”
32
The campaign reached full ferocity after March 24, when
NATO began high-altitude bombing of Serb positions in Kosovo and other targets
throughout Yugoslavia. This would remain the exclusive NATO military tactic. The
Allies seemed terrified of taking casualties, on the ground or in the air, and jeop-
ardizing popular support for the war. They also assumed that Milosevic would quickly
crumble in the face of Allied aerial assault. This proved “a colossal miscalculation,”
and there are in fact grounds for arguing that the bombing prompted an escalation
and intensification of the Serbs’ genocidal strategies. “NATO leaders, then, stand
accused of exacerbating the very humanitarian disaster that their actions were justified
as averting.”
33
The Serb campaign against Kosovar Albanians bore many of the hallmarks of
earlier Serb campaigns. Army units and paramilitary forces worked in close
coordination to empty the territory of ethnic Albanians through selective acts of terror
and mass murder. Gendercidal killing again predominated, as in the largest massacre
of the war, at the village of Meja:
Shortly before dawn on April 27, according to locals, a large contingent of Yugoslav
army troops garrisoned in Junik started moving eastward through the valley,
dragging men from their houses and pushing them into trucks. “Go to Albania!”
they screamed at the women before driving on to the next town with their
prisoners. By the time they got to Meja they had collected as many as 300 men.
BOSNIA AND KOSOVO
221
The regular army took up positions around the town while the militia and
paramilitaries went through the houses grabbing the last few villagers and shoving
them out into the road. The men were surrounded by fields most of them had
worked in their whole lives, and they could look up and see mountains they’d
admired since they were children. Around noon the first group was led to the
compost heap, gunned down, and burned under piles of cornhusks. A few minutes
later a group of about 70 were forced to lie down in three neat rows and were
machine-gunned in the back. The rest – about 35 men – were taken to a farmhouse
along the Gjakove road, pushed into one of the rooms, and then shot through
the windows at point-blank range. The militiamen who did this then stepped
inside, finished them off with shots to the head, and burned the house down. They
walked away singing.
34
About 10,000 ethnic Albanians died during the war, along with some Serbs and Roma
(Gypsies).
35
The killings were accompanied by the largest mass deportation of a
civilian population in decades. Some 800,000 Kosovar Albanians were rounded up
and expelled to Albania and Macedonia. Pictures of the exodus bolstered Western
resolve, and the Allies began to talk about putting boots on the ground.
In response to Russian pressure, and perhaps chastened by his indictment on war-
crimes charges (on May 27, 1999), Milosevic agreed to a ceasefire. The arrangement
allowed for the withdrawal of Serb forces from Kosovo, and the introduction of
18,000 NATO troops along with 3,500 UN police. These outside forces arrived
quickly, but not rapidly – or resolutely – enough to prevent a round of revenge attacks
launched by ethnic Albanians against Serb civilians in northern Kosovo. These
prompted 150,000 Serbs to flee as refugees to the Serbian heartland, where they
joined the 200,000 still stranded by Operation Storm in 1995.
■
AFTERMATHS
The Dayton Accords brought peace to Bosnia-Herzegovina, and between Croatia and
what was left of Yugoslavia. They also froze in place the genocidal “ethnic cleansing”
of preceding years. The peace was the peace of the grave: a quarter of a million people
had died in Bosnia-Herzegovina, while an astonishing 1,282,000 were registered as
internally displaced.
36
Despite formal declarations that all displaced persons should
be allowed to return to their homes, in Bosnia the “ground reality...in many ways
resembles de facto nationalist partition rather than a single, sovereign state....The
overwhelming majority of Bosnians, well over 90%, now live in areas that are largely
homogeneous in the national sense.”
37
The new state of Bosnia-Herzegovina was administered by the Organization
for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), under an arrangement that gave
its High Representative “far-reaching powers . . . extend[ing] well beyond military
matters to cover the most basic aspects of government and state.”
38
Over US$5 billion
was pledged to “the largest per capita reconstruction plan in history,”
39
and tens of
thousands of NATO troops arrived to police the peace. (In December 2004, NATO
was replaced by a 7,000-strong European Union force, though most of the troops
BOSNIA AND KOSOVO
222
simply switched badges.) This “experiment in externally imposed democratisation”
preserved a tenuous stability across the territory, but it was unclear, as of 2005,
whether it could generate anything like an organic nation-state.
An important test of the post-Dayton era was the peace agreement between
Croatia and rump Yugoslavia. In 2004, with Croatia pushing for membership in
the European Union, the new Prime Minister Ivo Sanader shifted decisively away
from the extreme nationalism of Franjo Tudjman, who had died in 2001. After years
of “insurmountable impediments” (according to Human Rights Watch) being placed
in the way of Serbs attempting to return to their homes, Sanader promised greater
receptiveness. As the British newspaper the Guardian pointed out, however, he ran
“little political risk” for doing so, “simply because so few Serbs are returning.” While
some 70,000 mostly elderly Serbs had returned, over 200,000 remained refugees in
Bosnia-Herzegovina and Serbia and Montenegro.
40
What of those who had supervised and committed the atrocities? Many lived in
comfort, protected by their ethnic communities and by the lackadaisical approach
of NATO forces to rounding them up. But the course of international justice regis-
tered successes. The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia
(ICTY), established by the UN Security Council in May 1993, began its proceedings
at the Hague on May 16, 1996. Many greeted the tribunal with derision, viewing
it as too little, too late. Nonetheless, by late 2004 the Tribunal had conducted
fifty-two prosecutions and sentenced thirty individuals. Its greatest coup came on
June 28, 2001, when former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic was transported
to the Hague to stand trial. (Milosevic had been toppled by a popular uprising in
September 2000, after refusing to recognize adverse election results.) The successor
government under Vojislav Kostunica saw surrendering Milosevic as the price of
rejoining the international community. Milosevic, charged with genocide for crimes
in Bosnia-Herzegovina,
41
waged a protracted and spirited defense before the tribunal,
but died in March 2006 before a verdict was reached.
Milosevic’s partners in crime during the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina – former
Bosnian Serb president Radovan Karadzic and General Ratko Mladic, the butcher
of Srebrenica – remained at large. But at least one prominent Bosnian Serb com-
mander, General Radislav Krstic, was captured and turned over to the Hague, where
he was found guilty in August 2001 of the crime of genocide for his leading role in
the carnage at Srebrenica. Croatian, Bosnian Muslim, and Kosovar Albanian suspects
also faced the tribunal – as with the 2001 indictment of Croatian General Ante
Gotovina for atrocities committed in Krajina, and Kosovo Prime Minister Ranush
Haradinaj, indicted by the tribunal in March 2005 on charges of “murder, rape and
deportation of civilians.”
42
(For more on the ICTY, see Chapter 15.)
Whatever precarious stability obtained in Bosnia, it was not matched in Kosovo,
which remained under Serb sovereignty but international control. Ethnic-Albanian
extremists sought to provoke panic and flight among the territory’s beleaguered
Serbs (and Roma, whom Kosovar Albanians perceived as Serb allies and henchmen).
In March 2004, the largest anti-Serb pogrom to date killed nineteen people and
destroyed hundreds of Serb homes. Human Rights Watch criticized international
forces for doing little to stop the violence: “In many cases, minorities under attack
were left entirely unprotected and at the mercy of the rioters....In too many cases,
BOSNIA AND KOSOVO
223
Nato peacekeepers locked the gates to their bases and watched as Serb homes
burned.”
43
Both the political status of Kosovo and the future of the Serb population
in the north were in doubt as this book went to press.
■
FURTHER STUDY
Fred Abrahams, Gilles Peress, and Eric Stover, A Village Destroyed, May 14, 1999:
War Crimes in Kosovo. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001. Vivid
photographic record and text.
David Chandler, Bosnia: Faking Democracy after Dayton (2nd edn). London: Pluto
Press, 1999. Overview of Bosnia’s early postwar years.
Misha Glenny, The Fall of Yugoslavia: The Third Balkan War (3rd rev. edn). London:
Penguin, 1996. Solid journalistic overview, best read alongside Silber and Little
(see below).
Helsinki Watch, War Crimes in Bosnia-Hercegovina, Vol. 2. New York: Human Rights
Watch, 1993. Detailed investigation of atrocities in the early phase of the Bosnian
war.
Michael Ignatieff, Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond. New York: Viking, 2000.
Examines Kosovo in the context of modern media and military technologies.
Robert D. Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History. New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 1993. Clichéd but influential survey of recent Balkans history.
Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), Kosovo/Kosova: As
Seen, As Told. Available at http://www.osce.org/kosovo/documents/reports/hr/
part1/. The most detailed report on atrocities in Kosovo.
David Rohde, Endgame: The Betrayal and Fall of Srebrenica, Europe’s Worst Massacre
Since World War II. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998. Heart-stopping account
of the 1995 catastrophe.
Michael P. Scharf and William A. Schabas, Slobodan Milosevic on Trial: A Companion.
New York: Continuum, 2002. Background to, and evaluation of, the case against
the former Serbian dictator.
Louis Sell, Slobodan Milosevic and the Destruction of Yugoslavia. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2002. Excellent study of Milosevic’s rise and fall.
Laura Silber and Allan Little, The Death of Yugoslavia (rev. edn). London: BBC
Books, 1996. The best introduction to the breakup of Yugoslavia.
Chuck Sudetic, Blood and Vengeance: One Family’s Story of the War in Bosnia. London:
Penguin, 1998. Intimate portrait of Bosnia in upheaval.
Ed Vulliamy, Seasons in Hell: Understanding Bosnia’s War. New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 1994. Seminal reportage from the war zone.
■
NOTES
1 Misha Glenny, The Fall of Yugoslavia (3rd rev. edn) (London: Penguin, 1996), p. 86.
2 Of Milosevic, Louis Sell writes, “Nationalism for him was just a tool. Milosevic dropped
nationalism just as quickly when it became inconvenient to his efforts to cultivate the
image of a peacemaker.” Louis Sell, Slobodan Milosevic and the Destruction of Yugoslavia
BOSNIA AND KOSOVO
224
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), p. 170. For insights into the roots of Serb
nationalism, see Branimir Anzulovic, Heavenly Serbia: From Myth to Genocide (New York:
New York University Press, 1999).
3 On the early deployment of the rhetoric of “genocide” in the Balkan wars, see Bette
Denich, “Dismembering Yugoslavia: Nationalist Ideologies and the Symbolic Revival of
Genocide,” American Ethnologist, 21 (1994), pp. 367–90. In 1986, a declaration by the
Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts referred to “the physical, political, legal, and
cultural genocide of the Serbian population of Kosovo” (quoted in Peter Ronayne,
“Genocide in Kosovo,” Human Rights Review, 5: 4 [July 2004], p. 59). Kosovo had addi-
tional symbolic importance to Serbs as the site of “the Serbian Golgotha,” a famous 1389
battle with the Ottoman armies that Serbs viewed as a heroic defeat, though most histo-
rians regard its outcome as inconclusive. See Michael Sells, “Kosovo Mythology and the
Bosnian Genocide,” ch. 8 in Omer Bartov and Phyllis Mack, In God’s Name: Genocide and
Religion in the Twentieth Century (New York: Berghahn Books, 2001), pp. 180–205.
4 Laura Silber and Allan Little, The Death of Yugoslavia (rev. edn) (London: BBC Books,
1996), p. 37.
5 Glenny, The Fall of Yugoslavia, pp. 46, 67.
6 “Though Sarajevo grabbed the headlines, it was clear from the first day of the war
that eastern Bosnia, with its hydroelectric dams, highways, and Muslim-majority
population, was the key to the Serb leaders’ plans to partition Bosnia.” Chuck Sudetic,
Blood and Vengeance: One Family’s Story of the War in Bosnia (London: Penguin, 1998),
p. 100. Silber and Little also note that “during the summer months of 1992...the
world’s media concentrated almost exclusively on the siege and bombardment of
[Sarajevo], even though much more decisive battles and campaigns were being waged
elsewhere....[This] suited Serb leaders very well.” Silber and Little, The Death of
Yugoslavia, p. 253.
7 Aside from the thousands of human casualties, the Muslim–Croatian conflict claimed the
famous bridge at Mostar, which mirrored Sarajevo with its Catholic, Greek Orthodox,
and Muslim populations. The bridge was totally destroyed by Croatian shelling, and
reopened only in 2004.
8 Cited in James Waller, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass
Killing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 262.
9 Among the reporters was Ed Vulliamy, who has given a detailed descriptions of the camps
and their discovery in his book Seasons in Hell (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1994).
10 David Hirsh, Law against Genocide: Cosmopolitan Trials (London: Glasshouse Press,
2003), pp. 66–67.
11 Marshall quoted in Silber and Little, The Death of Yugoslavia, p. 250.
12 Silber and Little, The Death of Yugoslavia, p. 245.
13 Mark Danner, “Endgame in Kosovo,” New York Review of Books, May 6, 1999, p. 8
14 Helsinki Watch, War Crimes in Bosnia-Hercegovina, Vol. 2 (New York: Human Rights
Watch, 1993), pp. 82–83.
15 International Committee of the Red Cross, “The Impact of Armed Conflict on Women,”
March 6, 2001, available at http://www.reliefweb.int/library/documents/2001/icrc-
women-17oct.pdf.
16 Slavenka Draculic, “Rape After Rape After Rape,” New York Times, December 13, 1992.
17 For example, the most bestial of the camps, Omarska, held some 2,000 men and thirty-
three to thirty-eight women (Helsinki Watch, War Crimes in Bosnia-Hercegovina, p. 87).
For analysis, in global-historical context, of the sexual torture and rape of Bosnian males,
see Augusta Del Zotto and Adam Jones, “Male-on-male Sexual Violence in Wartime:
Human Rights’ Last Taboo?,” paper presented to the Annual Convention of the Inter-
national Studies Association (ISA), New Orleans, LA, March 23–27, 2002. Available
online at http://adamjones.freeservers.com/malerape.htm.
18 The raids were accompanied by “a horde of Muslim refugees, men and women, young
and old, who were driven by hunger and, in many cases, a thirst for revenge. Thousands
strong, these people would lurk behind the first wave of attacking soldiers and run amok
BOSNIA AND KOSOVO
225
when the defenses around Serb villages collapsed. Some of the refugees used pistols to do
the killing; others used knives, bats, and hatchets. But most of them had nothing but their
bare hands and the empty rucksacks and suitcases they strapped onto their backs. They
came to be known as torbari, the bag people. And they were beyond [Naser] Oric’s
control.” Sudetic, Blood and Vengeance, p. 157.
19 See David Rohde, Endgame: The Betrayal and Fall of Srebrenica, Europe’s Worst Massacre
since World War II (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997).
20 Quoted in Mark Danner, “The Killing Fields of Bosnia,” New York Review of Books,
September 24, 1998 (citing reporting by Roy Gutman of Newsday).
21 Avdic’s testimony is recounted in Jan Willem Honig and Norbert Both, Srebrenica:
Record of a War Crime (London: Penguin, 1996), p. 62.
22 Perez de Cuellar quoted in Glenny, The Fall of Yugoslavia, p. 164.
23 Quoted in Sell, Slobodan Milosevic, p. 234.
24 Sell, Slobodan Milosevic, p. 215.
25 See Mark Danner, “Operation Storm,” New York Review of Books, October 22, 1998.
26 Glenny, The Fall of Yugoslavia, p. 284.
27 Tudjman quoted in “Stormy Memories,” The Economist, July 30, 2005.
28 Stated one European diplomat: “Until now at least the international community has been
united in its condemnation of ethnic cleansing. Now it seems one of its members is
openly supporting the mass movement of population by the most terrible force.” Quoted
in Glenny, The Fall of Yugoslavia, p. 285.
29 Sell, Slobodan Milosevic, p. 93.
30 Danner, “Endgame in Kosovo,” p. 11.
31 This is a common theme of the literature cited in Chapter 16, n. 26.
32 Sell, Slobodan Milosevic, p. 304.
33 Nicholas Wheeler, Saving Strangers: Humanitarian Intervention in International Society
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 269.
34 Sebastian Junger, “The Forensics of War,” in Junger, Fire (New York: W.W. Norton,
2001), p. 158. Another reporter estimates that 500 men were killed in the Meja massacre:
see Joshua Hammer, “On the Trail of Hard Truth,” Newsweek, July 9, 2000.
35 The debate over the alleged “exaggeration” of Kosovar Albanian deaths was spirited
after the war, and reflects, in Samantha Power’s estimation, “the inescapable difficulty
of accurately gauging the scale of atrocities while they are being committed.” Power,
“A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 2002),
p. 467. Power notes that the ICTY “has received reports that some 11,334 Albanians are
buried in 529 sites in Kosovo alone”; moreover, “In 2001 some 427 dead Albanians from
Kosovo were exhumed in five mass graves that had been hidden in Serbia proper. An
additional three mass grave sites, containing more than 1,000 bodies, were found in a
Belgrade suburb and awaited exhumation. Each of the newly discovered sites lies near
Yugoslav army or police barracks” (pp. 471–72). For a critique of attempts to downplay
genocide in Kosovo, see Adam Jones, “Kosovo: Orders of Magnitude,” IDEA: A Journal
of Social Issues, 5: 1 (July 2000), available at http://www.ideajournal.com/articles.php
?id=24.
36 Figures on dead and displaced from Rory Keane, Reconstituting Sovereignty: Post-Dayton
Bosnia Uncovered (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002), p. 69.
37 Sumantra Bose, Bosnia after Dayton: Nationalist Partition and International Intervention
(London: Horst & Co., 2002), pp. 22, 34.
38 David Chandler, Bosnia: Faking Democracy after Dayton (2nd edn) (London: Pluto Press,
1999), p. 43.
39 Bose, Bosnia after Dayton, p. 6.
40 Ian Traynor, “Croatia Builds Goodwill in Serb Villages,” Guardian, June 19, 2004.
41 Genocide was “curiously absent” from the charge-sheet for Milosevic’s actions in Kosovo,
“despite the fact that the arc of crime and atrocity in Kosovo seems to fit the Convention’s
legal definition quite neatly.” Peter Ronayne, “Genocide in Kosovo,” Human Rights
Review, 5: 4 (2004), p. 66.
BOSNIA AND KOSOVO
226
42 “Ex-Kosovo PM Pleads Not Guilty to War Crimes,” Reuters dispatch, March 14, 2005.
43 “UN and Nato Slammed over Kosovo,” BBC Online, July 26, 2004. http://news.bbc.co.
uk/1/hi/world/europe/3928153.stm.
BOSNIA AND KOSOVO
227
BOX 8A GENOCIDE IN BANGLADESH, 1971
By some estimates, the mass killings in Bangladesh – at the time, East Pakistan
– are on a par with the twentieth century’s most destructive genocides. At least
one million Bengalis, perhaps as many as three million,
1
were massacred by
the security forces of West Pakistan, assisted by local allies. Yet the genocide
remains almost unknown in the West. Only recently has its prominence slightly
increased, as a result of a handful of education and memorialization projects.
2
Although it preceded events in the Balkans by two decades, the Bangladeshi
genocide is usefully placed alongside the Bosnia and Kosovo case study. Both
conflicts had at their core a militarized security threat; a crisis surrounding
secession of federal units; and ethnic conflict. On a strategic and tactical level,
both genocides featured strong elements of “eliticide” (the destruction of the
socioeconomic and intellectual elites of a target group), as well as the gendercidal
targeting of adult and adolescent males (see Chapter 13).
The federation of East and West Pakistan was forged in the crucible of
Indian independence in 1947–48. Most of India had been under British rule
for two centuries. As independence loomed after the Second World War, two
distinct political projects arose. One, associated with the century’s leading
proponent of non-violence, Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi, sought to keep
India whole and prevent division along religious and ethnic lines. However,
strong Hindu and Muslim nationalist movements, together with the depart-
ing British, pushed for the creation of two states – one Hindu-dominated
(India), the other Muslim-dominated (Pakistan). This project emerged
triumphant, but not without enormous bloodshed. The partition of India in
1947 witnessed one of the greatest movements of peoples in modern times, as
millions of Muslims fled India for Pakistan, and millions of Hindus moved in
the other direction. Hundreds of thousands of people were slaughtered on both
sides.
3
Not the least of Pakistan’s post-independence difficulties was its division into
two wings, separated by 1,200 miles of Indian territory and an ethnolinguistic
gulf. West Pakistan, home to some fifty-five million people in 1971, was pre-
dominantly Urdu-speaking. The Bengali speakers of East Pakistan occupied only
one-third of total Pakistani territory, but were the demographic majority – some
seventy-five million people. Most were Muslim, but there was also a large
Bengali Hindu minority (the Biharis) who suffered especially savage treatment
during the genocide. Even Bengali Muslims were viewed as second-class citizens
by the inhabitants of wealthier West Pakistan. Pakistani Lieutenant-General
A.A.K. Niazi referred to the Ganges river plain – home to the majority of
BOSNIA AND KOSOVO
228
Bengalis and the largest city, Dhaka – as a “low-lying land of low, lying people.”
According to R.J. Rummel, “Bengalis were often compared with monkeys and
chickens....The [minority] Hindus among the Bengalis were as Jews to the
Nazis: scum and vermin that [had] best be exterminated.”
4
Reacting to West Pakistan’s persistent discrimination and economic exploita-
tion,
5
a strong autonomy movement arose in the East, centered on the Awami
League of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. The spark for the conflagration came in
December 1970, in national elections held to pave the way for a transition
from military rule. The Awami League won a crushing victory – 167 out of
East Pakistan’s 169 parliamentary seats. This gave the League a majority in the
Pakistani Parliament as a whole, and the right to form the next government.
N
60 mi
60 km
Cox’s
Bazar
Comilla
Narayanganj
Brahmanbaria
India
Myanmar
(Burma)
Nepal
India
India
Bay of Bengal
Indian Ocean
Dhaka
Bangladesh
Sylhat
Jamalpur
Mymensingh
Jessore
Khulna
Barisal
Mungla
Rajshahi
Pabna
Rangpur
Dinajpur
Jamuna
Meghna
Madhumati
Ganges
River
Brahamaputra
River
M
o
u
t
h
s
o
f
t
h
e
G
a
n
g
e
s
Chittagong
BANGLADESH
LOW/HILLS/MOUNTAINS
Map 8a.1 Bangladesh
Source: Map provided by WorldAtlas.com
BOSNIA AND KOSOVO
229
West Pakistani rulers, led by General Yahya Khan, saw this as a direct threat to
their power and interests. After negotiations failed to resolve the impasse, Khan
met with four senior generals on February 22, 1971, and issued orders to
annihilate the Awami League and its popular base. From the outset, they
planned a campaign of genocide. “Kill three million [Bengalis],” said Khan, “and
the rest will eat out of our hands.”
6
On March 25, the genocide was launched. In an attempt to decapitate East
Pakistan’s political and intellectual leadership, Dhaka University – a center of
nationalist agitation – was attacked. Hundreds of students were killed in what
was dubbed “Operation Searchlight.” Working from prepared lists, death squads
roamed the streets. Perhaps 7,000 people died in a single night, 30,000 over
the course of a week. The terror sparked an epic flight by Bengalis: “it was
estimated that in April some thirty million people [!] were wandering helplessly
across East Pakistan to escape the grasp of the military.”
7
The ten to twelve
million-strong Hindu community of East Pakistan was also targeted en bloc;
Hindus comprised most of the ten million souls who fled to India as refugees.
This spurred increasing calls for Indian military intervention, which would have
the added advantage – from India’s perspective – of dismembering Pakistan.
(The countries had already fought two full-scale wars by 1971; they were, and
remain, poised for another one.) The surviving Awami League leadership moved
quickly to declare a fully independent Bangladesh, and to organize a guerrilla
resistance.
With the opening eliticide accomplished, the West Pakistani leadership
moved to eradicate the nationalist base. As the election results suggested, this
comprised the vast majority of Bengalis. Genocidal killing, however, followed
a gendercidal pattern, with all males beyond childhood viewed as actual or
potential guerrilla fighters. To produce the desired number of corpses, the West
Pakistanis set up “extermination camps”
8
and launched a massive round of
gendercidal killing:
The place of execution was the river edge [here, the Buriganga River outside
Dhaka], or the shallows near the shore, and the bodies were disposed of by
the simple means of permitting them to flow downstream. The killing took
place night after night. Usually the prisoners were roped together and made
to wade out into the river. They were in batches of six or eight, and in the
light of a powerful electric arc lamp, they were easy targets, black against the
silvery water. The executioners stood on the pier, shooting down at the
compact bunches of prisoners wading in the water. There were screams in
the hot night air, and then silence. The prisoners fell on their sides and their
bodies lapped against the shore. Then a new bunch of prisoners was brought
out, and the process was repeated. In the morning the village boatmen hauled
the bodies into midstream and the ropes binding the bodies were cut so that
each body drifted separately downstream.
9
BOSNIA AND KOSOVO
230
The West Pakistani campaign extended to mass rape, aimed at “dishonoring”
Bengali women and undermining Bengali society. Between 200,000 and
400,000 women were victimized. “Girls of eight and grandmothers of seventy-
five had been sexually assaulted,” wrote feminist author Susan Brownmiller in
her book, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape.
10
An unknown number of
women were gang-raped to death, or executed after repeated violations.
The slaughter and other atrocities were ended by one of the rare instances
of successful outside intervention in genocide.
11
Indian troops invaded in
December 1971, vanquishing West Pakistani forces in a couple of weeks. The
independence of Bangladesh was sealed, though at a staggering human cost.
In blood-letting following the expulsion of the West Pakistani army, perhaps
150,000 people were murdered by independence forces and local vigilantes.
Biharis who had collaborated with West Pakistani authorities were dealt with
especially harshly.
12
Themes of the post-genocide era include the continued
suffering and social marginalization of hundreds of thousands of Bengali rape
victims, and the enduring impunity of the génocidaires. None of the leaders of
the genocide has ever been brought to trial; all remain comfortably ensconced
in Pakistan (the former West Pakistan) and other countries. In recent years,
activists have worked to try those leaders before an international tribunal, so
far without success.
13
■
FURTHER STUDY
Rounaq Jahan, “Genocide in Bangladesh,” in Samuel Totten et al., eds, Century
of Genocide: Eyewitness Accounts and Critical Views. New York: Garland
Publishing, 1997. A rare treatment in the genocide-studies literature.
Anthony Mascarenhas, The Rape of Bangla Desh. Delhi: Vikas Publications,
1971. A decent overview; one takes what one can get in English on this
little-studied subject.
Robert Payne, Massacre. London: Macmillan, 1973. Journalistic account of the
genocide.
Richard Sisson and Leo Rose, War and Secession: Pakistan, India, and the
Creation of Bangladesh. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990.
Focuses on policy-making by leaders during the crisis.
■
NOTES
1 R.J. Rummel observes: “The human death toll over only 267 days was incredible.
Just to give for five out of the eighteen districts some incomplete statistics published
in Bangladesh newspapers or by an Inquiry Committee, the Pakistani army killed
100,000 Bengalis in Dacca, 150,000 in Khulna, 75,000 in Jessore, 95,000 in
Comilla, and 100,000 in Chittagong. For eighteen districts the total is 1,247,000
killed. This was an incomplete toll, and to this day no one really knows the final
BOSNIA AND KOSOVO
231
toll . . .,” which Rummel estimates may have reached three million. Rummel, Death
By Government (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1994), p. 331.
2 See in particular the Liberation War Museum Online at http://www.liberation
museum.org/.
3 On partition, see Paul R. Brass, “The Partition of India and Retributive Genocide
in the Punjab, 1946–47: Means, Methods, and Purposes,” Journal of Genocide
Research, 5: 1 (March 2003), pp. 71–101; Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence:
Voices from the Partition of India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000).
4 Rummel, Death by Government, p. 335.
5 “The Bangladesh nationalist movement was also fueled by a sense of economic
exploitation. Though jute, the major export earning commodity, was produced in
Bengal, most of the economic investments took place in Pakistan. A systematic
transfer of resources took place from East to West Pakistan creating a growing
economic disparity and a feeling among the Bengalis that they were being treated
as a colony by Pakistan.” Rounaq Jahan, “Genocide in Bangladesh,” ch. 10 in
Samuel Totten et al., eds, Century of Genocide: Eyewitness Accounts and Critical
Views (New York: Garland Publishing, 1997), p. 292.
6 Quoted in Robert Payne, Massacre (London: Macmillan, 1973), p. 50.
7 Payne, Massacre, p. 48.
8 Leo Kuper, The Prevention of Genocide (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1985), p. 47.
9 Payne, Massacre, p. 55. For more on the gendercidal character of the large majority
of killings during the genocide, see Adam Jones/Gendercide Watch, “Case Study:
Genocide in Bangladesh, 1971,” http://www.gendercide.org/case_bangladesh.
html, from which Box 8a is adapted.
10 Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (New York: Bantam,
1975), p. 83.
11 For a concise overview of the Indian intervention, see Nicholas J. Wheeler, “India
as Rescuer? Order versus Justice in the Bangladesh War of 1971,” ch. 2 in Wheeler,
Saving Strangers: Humanitarian Intervention in International Society (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 55–77. For a discussion of the role of the
United States and then-secretary of state Henry Kissinger, see Suhail Islam and Syed
Hassan, “The Wretched of the Nations: The West’s Role in Human Rights
Violations in the Bangladesh War of Independence,” in Adam Jones, ed., Genocide,
War Crimes and the West: History and Complicity (London: Zed Books, 2004),
pp. 201–13.
12 During the genocide, Urdu-speaking Biharis in East Pakistan “joined the West
Pakistanis in killing the Bengalis.” This exposed them to retaliation from “Awami
League supporters [who] also engaged in killing the West Pakistanis and Biharis in
East Pakistan. A white paper issued by the Pakistani government shows that the
Awami League had massacred at least 30,000 Biharis and West Pakistanis,”
atrocious behavior that nonetheless does not match the systematic slaughter of
Bengalis by the West Pakistanis and their Bihari allies. See Wardatul Akman,
“Atrocities against Humanity during the Liberation War in Bangladesh: A Case of
Genocide,” Journal of Genocide Research, 4: 4 (2002), p. 549; also “The Right to
Self Determination: The Secession of Bangladesh,” ch. 4 in Kuper, The Prevention
of Genocide, pp. 44–61.
13 See, e.g., the website of the evocatively named “Bangla Nuremberg” project,
http://www.shobak.org/bangla_nuremberg/.
Holocaust in Rwanda
■
INTRODUCTION: HORROR AND SHAME
The genocide that consumed the tiny Central African country of Rwanda from April
to July 1994 was in some ways without precedent. In just twelve weeks, at least one
million people – overwhelmingly Tutsis, but also tens of thousands of Hutus opposed
to the genocidal government – were murdered, primarily by machetes, clubs, and
small arms. About 80 percent of victims died in a “hurricane of death . . . between
the second week of April and the third week of May,” noted Gérard Prunier. “If
we consider that probably around 800,000 people were slaughtered during that
short period...the daily killing rate was at least five times that of the Nazi death
camps.”
1
While debate has raged over the extent of the complicity of “ordinary Germans”
in the genocide against the Jews and others, the German killers were in uniform, and
strict measures were taken to ensure that the civilian population did not witness the
mass slaughter. In Rwanda, by contrast, the civilian Hutu population – men, women,
and even children – was actively conscripted and comprised the bulk of génocidaires:
“For the first time in modern history, a state succeeded in transforming the mass of
its population into murderers.”
2
Despite noble pledges of “Never Again” following the Jewish Holocaust, the
international community stood by while a million defenseless victims died.
Numerous warnings of impending genocide were transmitted, and an armed United
Nations “assistance mission” (UNAMIR), under the command of Canadian Major-
General Roméo Dallaire, had been in place in the capital, Kigali, since October 1993.
232
CHAPTER 9
In what one UNAMIR officer would later refer to as an “act of total cowardice,”
3
well-armed foreign forces were flown in when the genocide broke out – but only
to evacuate whites. In one notorious instance captured on video, at the Caraes
Psychiatric Hospital in Ndera, Kigali prefecture, a few sobbing whites were evacuated
while rapacious militia members cruised just outside the gates, and some hundreds
of terrified Tutsi refugees begged the foreign troops for protection. “Solve your
problems yourselves,” shouted one soldier to the crowd. The Tutsis were massacred
within hours of the troops’ departure.
4
With the expatriates safely removed, the UN Security Council turned its attention
to withdrawing UNAMIR forces. A US State Department memorandum of April 14,
1994 instructed the US mission to the UN to “give highest priority to full, orderly
withdrawal of all UNAMIR personnel as soon as possible.”
5
On April 21, the Council
voted to withdraw all but 270 of the 2,500-strong UNAMIR contingent. “In a clearly
illegal act,” General Dallaire and Brigadier General Henry Kwami Anyidoho, who
commanded the Ghanaian contingent of the UN force, managed to defy the Council
order and hold on to about 470 peacekeepers. Even these few were enough to save
thousands of lives over the course of the genocide.
6
On May 17, the UN Security Council would finally vote to despatch 5,500
troops to Rwanda, “but authorizing a higher troop figure is not the same as actually
finding the troops’ contributors.”
7
The troops did not arrive until after the genocide
had ended. The United States spent long weeks bickering with the UN over the
lease of ancient armored-personnel carriers. They, too, would not arrive until “after
the genocide was over and they were stripped of machine guns, radio[s], tools, spare
parts and training manuals. General Dallaire described them as tons of rusting
metal.”
8
For all the lofty rhetoric of universal human rights, it seemed, “Rwanda was simply
too remote, too far, too poor, too little, and probably too black to be worthwhile,”
in the scathing assessment of human rights investigator Alison Des Forges.
9
General
Dallaire, for his part, issued a blistering denunciation at the end of his tenure in 1994:
“Although Rwanda and UNAMIR have been at the centre of a terrible human
tragedy, that is not to say Holocaust, and although many fine words had been
pronounced by all, including members of the Security Council, the tangible effort
. . . has been totally, completely ineffective.”
10
In March 2004, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan offered a qualified apology
for member states’ unwillingness to confront the Rwandan catastrophe. “The inter-
national community failed Rwanda, and that must leave us always with a sense
of bitter regret and abiding sorrow.” Ten years after the slaughter, Annan asked: “Are
we confident that, confronted by a new Rwanda today, we can respond effectively,
in good time?” His response was sobering: “We can by no means be certain we
would.”
11
■
BACKGROUND TO GENOCIDE
Understanding the human catastrophe that consumed Rwanda in 1994 requires
attention to a host of complex factors. They include:
HOLOCAUST IN RWANDA
233
• the colonial and post-colonial history of the country, notably the politicization
of Hutu and Tutsi ethnicities under Belgian rule and into the independence era
that began in 1959;
• the authoritarian and tightly regulated character of the political system installed
by the nation’s post-independence rulers, including the second-class political
status it assigned to Tutsis, fueling a Tutsi-led rebel movement based in Uganda;
• the role of outside actors, especially France, in financing and fueling Hutu
extremism;
• the pervasive economic crisis in Rwanda, one of the world’s poorest and most
densely populated countries;
• the international factors that inhibited and occasionally encouraged humanitarian
interventions in the first half of the 1990s.
As with the Balkans genocide (Chapter 8), foreign observers tended to view the
Rwandan conflict as an expression of “ancient tribal hatreds.” Until the twentieth
century, however, “Hutus” and “Tutsis” did not constitute separate nations. It is hard
even to describe them as distinct ethnicities, since they share the same language,
territory, and religion. Rather, the two groups in the pre-colonial period may be
viewed as social castes, based on material wealth. Broadly speaking, Tutsis were those
who owned cattle; Hutus tilled the land and provided labor to the Tutsis. The desig-
nations were hardly arbitrary, and they indeed had a basis in physiognomic differences
(see below). But they were fluid and permeable, as Professor of Government
Mahmood Mamdani notes: “The rare Hutu who was able to accumulate cattle and
rise through the socioeconomic hierarchy could kwihutura – shed Hutuness – and
achieve the political status of a Tutsi. Conversely, the loss of property could also lead
to the loss of status, summed up in the Kinyarwanda word gucupira.” These processes
were “of little significance statistically,” but “their social and political significance
cannot be overstated.”
12
Thus, “although Rwanda was definitely not a land of peace
and bucolic harmony before the arrival of the Europeans, there is no trace in its
precolonial history of systematic violence between Tutsi and Hutu as such.”
13
From its beginnings around the seventeenth century, the political organization of
Rwandan society featured “centralised forms of political authority and...a high
degree of social control,” reflecting “the fact that the land is small, the population
density is (and has always been) high and social interactions are constant, intense
and value-laden.”
14
This authoritarianism reached its apogee under the rule of
Mwami Kigeri Rwabugiri (1860-1895), at which point traditional obligations of
corvée labor came to be imposed on Hutus alone, “thereby polarizing the social
difference between Hutu and Tutsi.”
15
In 1894, Germany established indirect suzerainty over Rwanda, coopting and
taking over the pyramidal structure of political rule. The Germans gave way, after
their defeat in the First World War, to Belgian colonial administration. The Belgians
were the first to rigidly codify Hutu and Tutsi designations. In the divide-and-rule
tradition, Tutsis became colonial favorites and protégés.
16
In part, this reflected the
Tutsis’ minority status – it is often easier for colonizers to secure the allegiance of a
minority, which recognizes that its survival may depend on bonds with the imperial
authority (see Chapter 12). It also derived from an egregious nineteenth-century
HOLOCAUST IN RWANDA
234
contribution of the nascent discipline of anthropology. Early explorers of Central
Africa, notably the Englishman John Hanning Speke, propounded the “Hamitic
hypothesis.” This depicted the Hutu as offspring of Ham, the black son of Noah,
cursed by God and destined forever to serve as “hewers of wood and drawers of water”;
and, by noble contrast, the Tutsi caste, descended from the Nilotic civilization of
classical Egypt. As was typical of imperial racial theorizing, the mark of civilization
was grafted on to physiognomic difference, with the generally taller, supposedly more
refined Tutsis destined to rule, and shorter, allegedly less refined Hutus to serve.
17
Under Belgian rule and afterwards, Tutsis and Hutus were indoctrinated with this
Hamitic hypothesis. The caste character of the designations was gradually transformed
into a racial distinction that shaped ethnic identity and fueled Hutu resentment,
HOLOCAUST IN RWANDA
235
N
Burundi
Tanzania
Uganda
Dem. Rep.
of the Congo
Kigali
Kanyarau
River
Rusizi
River
Lake
Rweru
Akagera
River
Lake
Ihema
Lake
Bulera
Akagera
River
Lake
Cohaha
Volcans
Nat. Park
Kibungo
Butare
Gitarama
150 mi
150 km
Byumba
Cyangugu
Gisenyi
Ruhengeri
RWANDA
Kibuye
Map 9.1 Rwanda
Source: Map provided by WorldAtlas.com
which erupted first in post-independence massacres in 1959–60 and then, in 1994,
in genocide. In 1994, taller Hutus died at roadblocks because they were assumed to
be Tutsis, whatever their identity cards said. And the corpses of thousands of Tutsi
victims were dumped into the Nyabarongo river, which flowed into Lake Victoria,
the source of the Nile – thus symbolically dispatching Tutsis back to their “Nilotic”
origins (see Chapter 12 for more on the symbolic dimension of the Rwandan
genocide).
18
It was under the Belgians, too, that a new, racially segregated state, church, and
education system was constructed. Tutsis were assigned a dominant role in each.
19
The symbol of the newly bureaucratized system was the distribution of identity cards
defining every Rwandan as either Hutu, Tutsi, or Twa – the last of these a Pygmy
ethnicity, constituting around 2 percent of the population. The institution of these
identity cards was perpetuated by the post-colonial government, and in 1994 proved
a key genocidal facilitator. At the thousands of roadblocks established across the
country, carrying a Tutsi identity card meant a death sentence.
After the Second World War, with anti-colonial national liberation movements in
ascendance, Belgian authorities performed a dramatic about-face. Pro-independence
movements were springing up throughout the colonized world, and in Rwanda the
Tutsis, having benefited from their positions of dominance in education and the state
bureaucracy, moved to the forefront of the various anti-colonial initiatives. The
Belgians, perceiving the threat – and perhaps also influenced by the democratizing
tendency unleashed by the Second World War – switched their favor to the less-
educated, less-threatening Hutu majority. This unleashed pent-up Hutu frustrations,
and led to the first proto-genocidal massacres of Tutsis, claiming several thousand
victims. Tens of thousands of Tutsis fled to neighboring Zaire, Tanzania, and espe-
cially Uganda, where the exiles formed an armed rebel movement and launched
attacks into Rwanda.
Throughout the 1960s, remaining Rwandan Tutsis established a modus vivendi
with the new Hutu-dominated order. Although almost totally frozen out of formal
political power, they were not systematically expelled from other institutional spheres,
such as schools and the Catholic Church; and under the rule of Hutu dictator Juvénal
Habyarimana, who seized the presidency in a 1973 coup, their conditions improved.
But trouble was brewing just beneath the surface. Although Habyarimana pro-
jected a liberal image, to attract foreign aid, his regime was dominated by the akazu,
or “little house”: “a tightly knit mafia” of Hutus from the north of Rwanda that
coalesced around the figure of Habyarimana’s wife, Agathe.
20
It was the akazu that,
operating as “the ‘invisible government’ of Rwanda during Habyarimana’s reign,”
21
gradually increased ethnic hatred against the Tutsis, encouraging a climate of fear
and panic to forestall demands for democracy.
In 1987, Rwandan exiles in Uganda formed the Rwandan Patriotic Front, and
in 1990 the RPF launched a military invasion of Rwanda.
22
This offensive had
three crucial results. First, it brought immediate outside assistance to prop up the
Habyarimana regime – from France, a country that had constructed its post-colonial
role in Africa around support for La Francophonie, the network of French-speaking
countries that Paris viewed as a bulwark against the “Anglo” influence typified by
Uganda. French forces succeeded in stalling the RPF invasion, and they remained
HOLOCAUST IN RWANDA
236
to train and advise the Hutu military and militias that would implement the 1994
genocide. Second, military conflict exacerbated the economic crisis in Rwanda.
“Fragile at the start, the Rwandan economy...crumbled under the burden of the
costs of war,” wrote Alison Des Forges. “Living conditions worsened dramatically as
per capita income that stood at US $320 in 1989 (nineteenth poorest in the world)
fell to US $200 in 1993.”
23
Third, the invasion, with its abuses and atrocities against
Hutu civilians, contributed to a growing climate of fear among ordinary Hutus,
already deeply anxious after genocidal massacres of Hutus in next-door Burundi by
the Tutsi-dominated armed forces there.
24
Invasion from without; economic crisis; growing domestic and international
support for extremists – it is hard to imagine more propitious circumstances for
genocide. Between 1990 and 1993, “a series of minipogroms against Tutsi [took
place] in different parts of the country,” which in retrospect appear to be “rehearsals
for the conflagration of 1994.”
25
Perhaps 2,000 people were murdered. A UN Special
Rapporteur, Bacre Waly Ndiaye, visited Rwanda in April 1993 and “decided that the
word genocide was appropriate and that the Convention on the Prevention and
Punishment of the Crime of Genocide of 1948 was applicable” to these killings. His
superiors in Geneva warned him to avoid the term, but he used it nonetheless in his
report, which was quickly buried (“Ndiaye said later that he might just as well have
put the report in a bottle and thrown it into the sea”).
26
Exterminationist propaganda against Tutsis became commonplace in Rwanda.
As early as December 1990, the infamous “Hutu Ten Commandments” were issued
by the Hutu extremist paper Kangura; “The Hutu must be firm and vigilant against
their common Tutsi enemy,” read one of the commandments. In August 1993, the
radio station RTLM (Radio-Télévision Libre des Mille Collines) began broadcasting,
with funding from the Christian Democratic International.
27
RTLM transformed the
staid Rwandan media, and fueled a hysterical fear of the threat posed by RPF forces
and their “fifth column” inside Rwanda – the Tutsi minority, designated by RTLM
as inyenzi, or “cockroaches.” “The cruelty of the inyenzi is incurable,” declared one
broadcast; “the[ir] cruelty...can only be cured by their total extermination.”
28
Propaganda and militia killings reached a peak precisely when the Habyarimana
regime was being pressured to respect its 1990 pledge to implement multiparty
democracy and seek peace with the RPF. The Arusha Peace Accords of August 1993
guaranteed free elections in less than two years, to include the RPF, which had been
allowed to install several hundred troops in Kigali. Some 2,500 foreign peacekeepers
arrived to constitute the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR);
their task was to monitor the ceasefire and the prelude to elections.
The Arusha Accords and the UNAMIR intervention proved to be the last straw
for “Hutu Power” extremists. Genocide against the Tutsi minority would simul-
taneously eliminate the perceived constituency for the RPF; resolve the economic
crisis through distribution of Tutsi land, wealth, and jobs; and bind the Hutu majority
in genocidal complicity. The extremists imported hundreds of thousands of machetes
in 1993–94; this weapon would become the symbol of the Rwanda genocide.
HOLOCAUST IN RWANDA
237
■
GENOCIDAL FRENZY
29
At 8:30 p.m. on April 6, 1994, the plane carrying President Habyarimana back from
talks in Tanzania was shot down as it neared Kigali airport. By 9:18, the Presidential
Guard had begun to erect roadblocks around Kigali.
The following day, working from carefully prepared lists, soldiers and militias
began murdering thousands of Tutsis and oppositionist Hutus. Crucially, ten Belgian
peacekeepers protecting the moderate Prime Minister, Agathe Uwimiliyana, were
seized, tortured, and murdered, along with Uwimiliyana herself. The murders
prompted Belgium to withdraw its remaining forces from Rwanda. Over the heated
protests of UNAMIR commander Dallaire, other countries followed suit. Foreign
journalists also departed en bloc.
From the start, the extremist government capitalized on several factors that they
appear to have known would limit outside opposition to the genocide. First, they
played upon stereotypes of African “tribal conflict,” depicting the killings as reciprocal
excesses. Second, they seem to have realized that killing some foreign troops would
scare away the remainder, with memories still fresh of the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu,
when two dozen Pakistani troops and eighteen US Rangers died at the hands of
Somali militias.
30
Third, the extremists benefited from the “blind commitment”
of the French government to its Rwandan counterpart: “the Rwandese leadership kept
believing that no matter what it did, French support would always be forthcoming.
And it had no valid reasons for believing otherwise.”
31
Lastly, the “Hutu Power”
regime exploited the limited energy and resources of international media and public
opinion where Africa was concerned, and the fact that media attention was over-
whelmingly directed towards the inaugural free elections in South Africa.
Army and militia forces went street to street, block by block, and house to
house, in Kigali and every other major city save Butare in the south (which resisted
the genocidal impetus for two weeks before its prefect was deposed and killed, and
replaced by a compliant génocidaire). Tutsis were dragged out of homes and hiding
places and murdered, often after torture and rape. At the infamous roadblocks,
those carrying Tutsi identity cards – along with some Hutus who were deemed to
“look” Tutsi – were shot or hacked to death. Often the killers, whether drunk and
willing or conscripted and reluctant, severed the Achilles’ tendon of their victims to
immobilize them. They would be left for hours in agony, until the murderers
mustered the energy to return and finish them off. Numerous accounts exist of Tutsis
paying to be killed by rifle bullets, rather than slowly and agonizingly with machetes
and hoes.
In what can only be called “an incomprehensible scandal,”
32
the killings took place
literally before the eyes of UNAMIR and other foreign forces, whose mandate and
orders forbade them to intervene. As early as April 9, in the church at Gikondo in
Kigali, a slaughter occurred that presaged the strategies to be followed in coming
weeks – one that was witnessed by Polish nuns, priests, and UN military observers:
A Presidential Guard officer arrived and told the soldiers not to waste their bullets
because the Interahamwe [Hutu Power militia] would soon come with machetes.
Then the militia came in, one hundred of them, and threatening the [Polish]
HOLOCAUST IN RWANDA
238
priests they began to kill people, slashing with their machetes and clubs, hacking
arms, legs, genitals and the faces of the terrified people who tried to protect the
children under the pews. Some people were dragged outside the church and
attacked in the courtyard. The killing continued for two hours as the whole
compound was searched. Only two people are believed to have survived the killing
at the church. Not even babies were spared. That day in Gikondo there was a
street littered with corpses the length of a kilometre....The killing in Gikondo
was done in broad daylight with no attempt to disguise the identity of the killers,
who were convinced that there would be no punishment for their actions.
33
The following day, April 10, the UN established contact with military observers in
Gisenyi, the heartland of Hutu extremism, where mass killing had erupted three days
earlier. The stunned observers described “total chaos” with “massacres everywhere,”
leaving tens of thousands of Tutsi corpses.
34
With such reports to hand, and the eye-
witness testimony of observers in Gikondo, the UN and the international community
was fully aware, within a few days of Habyarimana’s death on April 6, that killing on
a genocidal scale was occurring in Rwanda. They did nothing, though there were more
than enough troops on hand to stop the killings in Kigali at the very least.
35
Indeed,
Security Council members – notably France and the US – both cautioned against
and actually ridiculed the use of the word “genocide.” It seems evident, in retrospect,
that the génocidaires were not only hoping for such a response, but were awaiting it
before launching a full-scale slaughter. Linda Melvern’s fine book Conspiracy to Murder
conveys the sense of suspended animation in the first week of the genocide, while
Hutu Power gauged international reactions to the opening wave of killing. When it
became clear there would be no outside impediment, murder spread like a virus across
the territories under extremist control. By April 23, Roméo Dallaire, on a journey
north from the capital, was “pass[ing] over bridges in swamps that had been lifted by
the force of the bodies piling up on the struts. We had inched our way through villages
of dead humans....We had created paths amongst the dead and half-dead with our
hands. And we had thrown up even when there was nothing in our stomachs.”
36
Tens of thousands of Tutsis sought sanctuary in schools, stadiums, and especially
places of worship. But there was no sanctuary to be had. In fact, those encouraging
them to seek it were usually génocidaires working to concentrate their victims for mass
killing. Astonishingly, church figures across Rwanda played a leading role in legit-
imizing and even inflicting genocidal killing (although “many priests, pastors and
nuns” also displayed “courage and compassion,” hiding and protecting potential
victims).
37
Parish churches, along with schools and similar facilities, were soon piled thigh-
high with the shot, hacked, and savaged corpses of the victims.
38
One such massacre,
in fact, may stand as the most concentrated ground-level slaughter of the twentieth
century (by which is meant a mass killing inflicted in hours or days rather than
months or years, and by means other than aerial bombing). On April 20, at the parish
of Karama in Butare prefecture, “between thirty-five and forty-three thousand people
died in less than six hours.”
39
This was more than were killed in the Nazis’ two-day
slaughters of Jews outside Odessa and Kiev (at Babi Yar) in 1941, or in the largest
single-day extermination spree in the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau.
40
HOLOCAUST IN RWANDA
239
HOLOCAUST IN RWANDA
240
Figure 9.1 Tutsi women
murdered in the Rwandan
genocide of 1994.
Source: Panos Pictures/Martin Adler.
■
BOX 9.1 ONE WOMAN’S STORY: GLORIOSE MUKAKANIMBA
A Tutsi woman and mother of three, Gloriose Mukakanimba lived in the Rwandan
capital of Kigali, where she ran a tailoring shop. On April 7, 1994, she witnessed the
outbreak of the most intensive mass-killing spree in human history. Hutu militias –
HOLOCAUST IN RWANDA
241
the so-called interahamwe (“those who fight together”) – went door-to-door. They
first targeted “prominent and rich people,” Gloriose said, but quickly moved on to
attack ordinary citizens: “They shot you just because you were a Tutsi. When they
started using machetes, they didn’t even bother to ask for ID cards. It was as if they
had carried out a census; they knew you were a Tutsi.”
Gloriose’s home was one of those invaded. “Around 11:00 a.m. on Sunday [April
10] a large group of interahamwe came to our house. They tried to break the gate.
They had difficulties with the gate so they cut through the hedge. They came in and
started searching the house.” After a while, they prepared to leave – but their leader
arrived and ordered them “to go back in and kill.” Her family was ordered outside.
There, her husband, Déo Rutayisire, and her brother, Maurice Niyoyita, were hacked
to death with machetes. Gloriose tried to flee with her 2-year-old daughter in her
arms, but the child slipped from her grasp, “and I saw them cutting her up. I ran
with all the strength I had.”
While she desperately sought a place to hide, Gloriose was stunned to hear her
neighbors calling out to the militia members: “Here she is, here she is!” “These were
neighbors I had already considered friends, people I felt had been kind to me.” Finally
she found sanctuary in an abandoned house with an old vehicle parked adjacent.
“The bonnet was open and it did not have an engine. I jumped right inside the
bonnet and stayed there for about a day and a half.” Militia scoured the house,
coming close to the car where she was hiding. “I could feel them so near to me.
I was terrified to death. I stopped myself from breathing.”
When the interahamwe moved on, Gloriose begged for refuge from a neighbor who
had been friendly with her sister. But the neighbor demanded that she leave. She
decided to return to her house, only to run into an “ambush [that] had been set up
for me.” She was detained for a few hours, until the militia decided to execute her.
An interahamwe “hit me with the machete. Fortunately it was dark and he could
not see very well. He kept trying to aim for my neck but I instinctively put my hands
over my neck. He kept hitting my hands, thinking it was my neck. After a while,
I decided to let him think I was dead.” Finally “they left, thinking they had finished
their job.”
Gloriose ran to hide in a water-filled ditch. But “some other militia saw me and went
to tell my killers that they had not completed their job. The next morning, my killers
came back, this time with guns and grenades.” They shot and tossed grenades into
the trench, but Gloriose was able to evade them. “It was a very long trench. This
made it difficult for them to know my exact location because of course I kept
moving.”
Apparently believing she must have been killed by the fusillade, the militia again
moved on. “I spent the night in the trench. The wounds in my arms were not only
In Kibuye prefecture, some 20,000 Tutsis had congregated at Gatwaro stadium.
The stadium was surrounded by soldiers and militia, who began firing into the
stadium and at anyone who sought to flee. Twelve thousand people died in a single
day. Elsewhere in the prefecture, perhaps the most exterminatory killing of the
genocide took place. “Entire Tutsi communities were wiped out with no witnesses left
to tell what happened. From a population of 252,000 Tutsi in a 1991 census, by the
end of June there were an estimated 8,000 left alive.”
42
Many Tutsis fled to high ground, such as Bisesero mountain in southwestern
Rwanda. The “mountain of death” was the scene of unforgettable acts of resistance,
as Tutsis sought desperately to fend off the attacks. A survivor, Claver Mbugufe,
recalled:
There were constant attempts to kill the refugees at Bisesero. But we were always
able to defend ourselves. Towards mid-May, when we were still in the grip of the
interahamwe militia and their allies, they received enormous reinforcements....
Soldiers also came and set up a camp near Bisesero for three days, during which
they killed many refugees. We spent the entire day running up and down. We tried
to concentrate our defence in one area in order to break their stranglehold. We
did everything possible to kill any one of them who stood in our way. Sometimes,
we even managed to wrest guns from soldiers and policemen. We killed many of
these aggressors.
43
Despite such heroism, some 50,000 people died at Bisesero in April and May.
A series of other massacres, notably in Cyahindu prefecture, claimed over 10,000
victims at one time. Then there were the “death camps” such as those in the Kabgayi
archbishopric, where “over thirty thousand terrified Tutsis” congregated.
44
Militia
roamed freely through Kabgayi, selecting Tutsi men and boys for execution, and
women and girls for rape. (The gendering of the Rwandan catastrophe is discussed
further in Chapter 13.) This horror ended only when the Rwandan Patriotic Front
captured Kabgayi on June 2.
HOLOCAUST IN RWANDA
242
extremely painful but had come to smell. I decided to come out of the trench for
fear that I would die there.” She fled to the nearby residence of one of the few
surviving Tutsi families in the area: “I found out that the husband had been an invalid
for a long time; maybe that’s why the killers let them live.” Together with her
rescuers, she joined a flood of Tutsis heading towards the lines of the rebel Rwandan
Patriotic Front in Gitarama district.
On the verge of starvation, she and her companions finally stumbled on an RPF
patrol. She was taken to a health center in the city of Rutare. There, her wounds
were treated, and she was interviewed by researchers from African Rights, a London-
based organization that would go on to publish the most detailed and harrowing
account of the Rwandan genocide.
41
Throughout, a remarkable feature of the genocide was its routinized character. The
killings were “marked not by the fury of combat or paroxysms of mob violence, but
by a well-ordered sanity that mirrored the rhythms of ordinary collective life.”
45
Killers arrived for their duties at a designated hour, and broke off their murderous
activities at five in the afternoon, as though clocking off.
Another signal feature, as noted above, was the involvement of ordinary Hutus
in the slaughter. “Had the killing been the work of state functionaries and those
bribed by them,” writes Mamdani, “it would have translated into no more than a
string of massacres perpetrated by death squads. Without massacres by machete-
wielding civilian mobs, in the hundreds and thousands, there would have been no
genocide.”
46
In a development perhaps unprecedented in the history of genocide,
Hutu women flocked or were conscripted by the tens of thousands to participate in
the killing of Tutsis and the stripping of corpses. To the extent that their violence
was directed against Tutsi women,
there appears to have been a kind of gendered jubilation at the “comeuppance”
of Tutsi females, who had for so long been depicted in Hutu propaganda as
Rwanda’s sexual elite. Otherwise, the motivations for women’s involvement as
genocidal killers frequently paralleled those of Hutu men: bonds of ethnic
solidarity . . . suasion and coercion by those in authority (including other women);
the lure of material gain; and the intoxicating pleasure of untrammelled sadism.
47
It is impossible to know how many of the killers, male and female, would have
avoided their role if they could. It is clear, however, that hundreds of thousands of
Hutus participated eagerly. “It was as if all the men, women and children had come
to kill us,” recalled one survivor.
48
Many were motivated by greed – the chance to loot
Tutsi belongings and seize Tutsi land (see Chapter 10). And for those at the bottom
of the social ladder, there was the unprecedented opportunity to exercise life-and-
death power over others. Gérard Prunier captures this element vividly, noting that
“social envy came together with political hatred to fire the . . . bloodlust”:
In Kigali the [militias]...had tended to recruit mostly among the poor. As
soon as they went into action, they drew around them a cloud of even poorer
people, a lumpenproletariat of street boys, rag-pickers, car-washers and homeless
unemployed. For these people the genocide was the best thing that could ever
happen to them. They had the blessings of a form of authority to take revenge on
socially powerful people as long as these [victims] were on the wrong side of the
political fence. They could steal, they could kill with minimum justification, they
could rape and they could get drunk for free. This was wonderful. The political
aims pursued by the masters of this dark carnival were quite beyond their scope.
They just went along, knowing it would not last.
49
It did not last – in part because the killers were running out of victims, but in larger
part because the genocide distracted the Hutu Power regime from confronting RPF
forces. Immediately following the outbreak of the genocide on April 6–7, the RPF
contingent in Kigali had moved out of its barracks to establish control over several
HOLOCAUST IN RWANDA
243
neighborhoods of the capital, thereby protecting thousands of Tutsis who would
otherwise have faced certain death. Rwanda thus witnessed the surreal phenomenon
of street battles in the heart of the capital, while the government was extending the
holocaust to every corner of the countryside under its control. That control rapidly
ebbed, however, as the RPF renewed its offensive. By mid-June, they had decisively
defeated Rwandan government forces, which were pushed into a limited zone in the
southwest of the country. The offensive was accompanied by large-scale revenge
killings of Hutus in territory that RPF soldiers had overrun. Estimates of those killed
range as high as 50,000, with many summary executions, particularly of “battle-age”
Hutu men who were automatically assumed to have participated in the genocide.
50
At this point, foreign forces finally staged a decisive intervention – but one that
primarily benefited the génocidaires. On June 17, France proposed to the UN Security
Council that French troops be sent to Rwanda under UN auspices. Four days later,
thousands of French troops began assembling on the Rwandan border with Zaire –
an indication of how rapidly a substantial intervention can be mounted when the
political will exists.
51
On July 4, the RPF gained full control of the capital, Kigali;
the following day, France, with UN approval in hand, established a “safe zone” in
the southwest.
The French intervention succeeded in saving the lives of thousands of Tutsis,
but that was not its main motivation. Rather, the intervention was a continuation
of the long-standing French support for the Hutu Power government. It permitted
the orderly evacuation of nearly two million Hutus, including tens of thousands of
génocidaires, to refugee camps in neighboring Zaire. As Gérard Prunier writes, “the
refugees moved to the camps in perfect order, with their bourgmestres and communal
counsellors at their head. Inside the camps they remained grouped according to their
communes of origin and under the control of the very political structure which had
just been responsible for the genocide.”
52
This mass flow of refugees was highly visible to international media that gained
access to the camps. The humanitarian crisis – especially outbreaks of cholera and
other diseases that killed thousands of refugees – was something the international
community could address with minimum risk. The Clinton government in the US,
which had spent the period of the mass slaughter instructing its representatives to
avoid using the word “genocide” and placing obstacle after obstacle in the path of
intervention, now leapt into action. US troops arrived within days to begin
distribution of water, supplies, and medical aid to the camps.
“Like a monstrous cancer, the camps coalesced, solidified and implanted them-
selves in the flesh of east Zaire.”
53
Hutu extremists inflicted genocidal atrocities
against Tutsis living in eastern Zaire and staged cross-border raids into Rwanda,
prompting the newly installed RPF regime in Rwanda to launch operations in the
region that themselves led to the deaths of thousands of civilians, together with hard-
core génocidaires.
54
According to Rwanda expert Christian Scherrer, “The export of
genocide from Rwanda is the main cause in the spread of conflict to the whole of
the Central African region, and the chief reason for the unprecedented violence,
intensity, and destructiveness of that conflict” – possibly the most murderous since
the Second World War.
55
The complex war in the Democratic Republic of Congo is
examined in Box 10a.
HOLOCAUST IN RWANDA
244
■
AFTERMATH
Early estimates of the death-toll in the Rwandan genocide were between 500,000
and 800,000, overwhelmingly Tutsis. Subsequent investigations have revised these
mind-boggling figures upward. A detailed census in July 2000 cited 951,018 victims,
but estimated the total death-toll at over a million. According to a subsequent report,
“93.7% of the victims were killed because they were identified as Tutsi; 1% because
they were related to, married to or friends with Tutsi; 0.8% because they looked like
Tutsi; and 0.8% because they were opponents of the Hutu regime at the time or were
hiding people from the killers.”
56
Since Hutu Power was crushed in Rwanda in July 1994, the country has faced a
staggering task of material reconstruction, human recovery, restitution, and political
reconciliation. Fleeing Hutus had stripped the country almost bare, down to the zinc
roofing on houses. Nonetheless, the Tutsi-dominated regime scored notable successes.
Economic production was restored to pre-1994 levels. Approximately 1.3 million
Hutu refugees were repatriated from camps in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic
of Congo). At least a façade of pluralism was maintained in government and state
ranks: the victorious RPF established a “government of national unity” that featured
a few Hutus in prominent positions. Meanwhile, “All young Rwandans are [now]
obliged to attend ‘solidarity camps’ where they are taught to love one another,” an
experience that “some find . . . useful,” and “others less so.”
57
The basic orientation of the post-genocide government is clear: it is guided by
“the conviction that power is the condition of Tutsi survival.”
58
Its “Never Again”
rallying cry can be interpreted as a pledge that never again will Hutus achieve domi-
nance in Rwandan politics. “The reality,” wrote Gérard Prunier in 1997, “is that the
government is perceived by the average Hutu peasant as a foreign government.”
59
It is uncertain whether subsequent years warrant an alteration of that assessment.
The quest for justice has taken both national and international forms. In
November 1994, the United Nations established the International Criminal Tribunal
for Rwanda in Arusha, Tanzania. However, despite an impressive budget of US$1.8
billion, the tribunal proceeded excruciatingly slowly. It did not hear its first case until
1997, and as of May 2004 it had “convicted just 18 defendants of genocide and crimes
against humanity and . . . delivered 15 judgments against 21 defendants.”
60
One of
these convictions, however – that of Jean-Paul Akayesu – broke important legal
ground with its “historic determination that systematic rape was a crime against
humanity and that sexual violence constituted genocide in the same way as any other
act.”
61
In another case, two former media officials of Rwandan “hate radio” were
convicted of using media as genocidal instruments (see Chapter 15).
62
In Rwanda itself, some 120,000 accused génocidaires languished in grim conditions
in jail, while the country’s shattered legal system sought to bring at least some
of them to trial. Finally, in 2003, it was recognized that formal proceedings could
never cope with the massive number of accused. Over 20,000 prisoners were released,
and others were promised a reduction of sentences in return for confessions. The
most interesting – and controversial – form of attempted justice is gacaca, or “on the
grass,” a traditional form of tribunal that sacrifices formal legal procedures and
HOLOCAUST IN RWANDA
245
protections for speedy results that are widely viewed as acceptable to ordinary
Rwandans. The gacaca experiment, launched in January 2001, is discussed further
in Chapter 15.
While reconstruction and attempted reconciliation proceeded, thousands of
Tutsis continued to die from genocidal assaults – not only in cross-border attacks
launched by diehard génocidaires in Congo, but also from the effects of rape-induced
AIDS. One rape survivor, Eugenie Muhayimana, described how she had been
kidnapped by a Hutu militia member, held throughout the period of the genocide,
and then taken to Zaire when her captor fled in the mass exodus of July 1994. “He
would torture and harass me daily....He would rape me and go off to fight. He
would come back. He would rape me again. I came to hate my whole life. The only
thing I could feel each day was death.” Interviewed by the Los Angeles Times in 2004,
Muhayimana was HIV-positive and living in the “Village of Hope” in Kigali, a
sanctuary for widows of the genocide established by the Rwandan Women’s Network.
Asked what were her hopes for the future, she responded: “My first wish is to see my
children grow, to see them well-fed, to see them go to school and to university. My
second wish is to get access to antiretroviral drugs. If I have got two years to live,
that might push it out to four. If I have four left, that could push it to eight more years
or even to 10, so I could see them as adults. Then I can die. I don’t want to leave
them when they’re young.”
63
But with only 2 percent of the estimated 100,000
Rwandans in need of the antiretrovirals actually receiving them, Eugenie’s dream
seemed unlikely to be realized.
■
FURTHER STUDY
African Rights, Rwanda: Death, Despair and Defiance (rev. edn). London: African
Rights, 1995. Immense and harrowing depiction of the Rwandan holocaust.
Roméo Dallaire, Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda.
New York: Carroll & Graf, 2004. Autobiography of the leader of the UN mission
in Rwanda in 1993–94.
Alison Des Forges, Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda. New York:
Human Rights Watch, 1999. An indispensable human-rights report on the
genocide.
Nigel Eltringham, Accounting for Horror: Post-genocide Debates in Rwanda. London:
Pluto Press, 2004. The aftermath.
Ghosts of Rwanda. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/ghosts/.
Webpage for the PBS Frontline documentary, including interviews, video, and
useful links.
Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our
Families: Stories from Rwanda. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998.
Gourevitch’s bestselling work is energetic but overrated.
Jean Hatzfeld, Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak, trans. Linda Coverdale.
New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2005. Chilling testimony from imprisoned
génocidaires.
Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the
HOLOCAUST IN RWANDA
246
Genocide in Rwanda. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. How
political identity was constructed for Hutus and Tutsis.
Linda Melvern, Conspiracy to Murder: The Rwanda Genocide and the International
Community. London: Verso, 2004. Follow-up to the author’s hard-hitting
critique, A People Betrayed: The Role of the West in Rwanda’s Genocide.
Gérard Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide. New York: Columbia
University Press, 1997. The standard source on the origins of the genocide.
Carol Rittner, John K. Roth and Wendy Whitworth, eds, Genocide in Rwanda:
Complicity of the Churches? St. Paul, MN: Paragon House, 2004. Insights into the
church’s role.
Christian P. Scherrer, Genocide and Crisis in Central Africa: Conflict Roots, Mass
Violence, and Regional War. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2002. The most
complete account of the politics of the genocide and its regional repercussions.
■
NOTES
1 Gérard Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1997), p. 261.
2 Christian P. Scherrer, Genocide and Crisis: Conflict Roots, Mass Violence, and Regional War
(Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002), p. 109.
3 Colonel Luc Marchal, UNAMIR commander in Kigali; quoted in Chronicle of a Genocide
Foretold: Part 2, “We Were Cowards” (Ottawa: National Film Board of Canada [hereafter,
NFB], 1997).
4 International Panel of Eminent Personalities (IPEP) report, quoted in Kenneth J.
Campbell, Genocide and the Global Village (New York: Palgrave, 2001), p. 78. The scenes
at the psychiatric hospital, and the Belgian soldier’s comment, are available in the NFB
documentary Chronicle of a Genocide Foretold: Part 2.
5 Quoted in Maxim Kniazkov, “US ‘Ran from Rwanda Responsibility,’” Agence France-
Presse dispatch, August 22, 2001.
6 Linda Melvern, A People Betrayed: The Role of the West in Rwanda’s Genocide (London:
Zed Books, 2000), p. 174. See also Roméo Dallaire, Shake Hands with the Devil: The
Failure of Humanity in Rwanda (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2004). The International
Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) also refused to abandon the field, performing
extraordinarily dangerous and heroic work throughout the genocide (see Melvern, A
People Betrayed, p. 215).
7 John Heidenrich, How to Prevent Genocide: A Guide for Policymakers, Scholars, and the
Concerned Citizen (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001), p. 199.
8 Linda Melvern, Conspiracy to Murder: The Rwanda Genocide (London: Verso, 2004),
p. 240.
9 Quoted in NFB, Chronicle of a Genocide Foretold. Samantha Power writes: “It is shocking
to note that during the entire three months of the genocide, [President] Clinton never
assembled his top policy advisers to discuss the killings....Rwanda was never thought
to warrant its own top-level meeting.” Power, “A Problem From Hell”: America and the
Age of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 2002), p. 366.
10 Quoted in Power, “A Problem from Hell,” p. 382.
11 Annan speaking at Memorial Conference on Rwanda Genocide, New York; United
Nations Press Release, SG/SM/9223, AFR/870, HQ/631, 26 March 2004. http://
www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2004/sgsm9223.doc.htm.
12 Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the
Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 51, 70.
HOLOCAUST IN RWANDA
247
13 Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis, p. 39.
14 Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis, p. 3.
15 Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers, p. 66.
16 Prunier notes that “by the end of the Belgian presence in Rwanda in 1959, forty-three
[prefectural] chiefs out of forty-five were Tutsi as well as 549 sub-chiefs out of 559.”
Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis, p. 27.
17 The myth still occasionally surfaces, as when Andrew Bell-Fialkoff refers to “the Hamitic
Tutsi.” Bell-Fialkoff, Ethnic Cleansing (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1999), p. 182.
18 Christopher Taylor, Sacrifice as Terror: The Rwandan Genocide of 1994 (Oxford: Berg,
1999), pp. 128–30.
19 See Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers, p. 88.
20 Melvern, A People Betrayed, p. 42.
21 Scherrer, Genocide and Crisis, p. 105.
22 Many commentators have accused the RPF, under then-General, now-President Paul
Kagame, of “recklessness” for launching this invasion. Bill Berkeley, for example,
contends that “No rational person could have looked at the history of repeated mass
slaughters in Rwanda and Burundi since 1959 and doubted for a moment that at least
one likely outcome of such an invasion would be massive violence against defenseless
Tutsi civilians.” Berkeley, “Road to a Genocide,” in Nicolaus Mills and Kira Brunner,
eds, The New Killing Fields: Massacre and the Politics of Intervention (New York: Basic
Books, 2002), p. 114. See also Alan J. Kuperman, “Provoking Genocide: A Revised
History of the Rwandan Patriotic Front,” Journal of Genocide Research, 6: 1 (March
2004), pp. 61–84.
23 Alison Des Forges, Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda (New York, Human
Rights Watch, 1999), p. 122.
24 Burundi, like Rwanda, has a large Hutu majority and a small but traditionally dominant
Tutsi minority. In 1972, some 200,000 Hutus were slaughtered by the Tutsi-dominated
army, in what has been termed an “eliticide”: the primary targets were educated and/or
wealthy Hutu males. The 1972 genocide was echoed by further outbreaks of mass killing
of Hutu in 1988 (20,000 killed) and 1991 (a further 3,000 deaths). In October 1993 the
Hutu president of the country was killed, leading to an outburst of genocidal violence
against both Tutsis and Hutus that established a “basic pattern” for the events in Rwanda
the following year (Scherrer, Genocide and Crisis, p. 3). Bill Berkeley estimates that
“another hundred and fifty thousand have died in Burundi’s continuing bloodshed” since
1993 (Berkeley, “Road to a Genocide,” p. 110).
25 Catharine Newbury, “Ethnicity and the Politics of History in Rwanda,” in David E.
Lorey and William H. Beezley, eds, Genocide, Collective Violence, and Popular Memory:
The Politics of Remembrance in the Twentieth Century (Wilmington, DL: Scholarly
Resources, Inc., 2002), p. 76.
26 Melvern, Conspiracy to Murder, pp. 62–64.
27 Scherrer, Genocide and Crisis, p. 122.
28 Quoted in Melvern, A People Betrayed, p. 155.
29 This phrase is drawn from the title of ch. 8 of African Rights, Rwanda: Death, Despair
and Defiance (rev. edn) (London: African Rights, 1995).
30 The deaths of the US troops in Somalia were recounted in the book and film Black Hawk
Down.
31 Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis, p. 107.
32 Scherrer, Genocide and Crisis, p. 364.
33 Melvern, Conspiracy to Murder, p. 182.
34 Melvern, Conspiracy to Murder, p. 168.
35 “The officers of UNAMIR believe to this day that had the European troops that came
to rescue the expats stayed on in Rwanda, the killing could have been stopped there and
then. . . . Together with the moderates in the Rwandan army and with the peacekeepers
there would have been ample troops to restore calm. There were already 2,500 peace-
keepers with UNAMIR, there were 500 Belgian para-commandos, part of the evacuation
HOLOCAUST IN RWANDA
248
force, together with 450 French and 80 Italian soldiers from parachute regiments.
In neighbouring Kenya there were 500 Belgian para-commandos, also a part of the
evacuation operation. In Burundi there were 250 US Rangers, elite troops, who had come
to evacuate the US nationals. There were 800 more French troops on standby.” Melvern,
Conspiracy to Murder, p. 188.
36 Dallaire, Shake Hands with the Devil, p. 325.
37 African Rights, Death, Despair and Defiance, p. 922. As one génocidaire recalled: “The
white priests took off at the first skirmishes. The black priests joined the killers or the
killed. God kept silent, and the churches stank from abandoned bodies.” Quoted in Jean
Hatzfeld (trans. Linda Coverdale), Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak (New
York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2005), p. 142. On the churches’ role more generally, see
Hugh McCullum, The Angels Have Left Us: The Rwanda Tragedy and the Churches
(Geneva: WCC Publications, 2004); and Carol Rittner, John K. Roth and Wendy
Whitworth, eds, Genocide in Rwanda: Complicity of the Churches? (St. Paul, MN: Paragon
House, 2005).
38 According to Christian Scherrer, “The map showing the places where the largest
massacres occurred was almost identical with that of the religious centers in the various
dioceses and parishes of Rwanda.” Scherrer, Genocide and Crisis, p. 113.
39 African Rights, Rwanda: Not So Innocent: When Women Become Killers (London: African
Rights, 1995), p. 26, emphasis added.
40 The death-tolls usually cited for these cases are 36,000 (Odessa) and 33,000 (Kiev);
according to Eugen Kogon, the highest number of killings in a single day at Auschwitz-
Birkenau was 34,000 (Kogon, The Theory and Practice of Hell [New York: The Berkley
Publishing Company, 1980], p. 241).
41 African Rights, Rwanda: Death, Despair and Defiance, pp. 590–95.
42 Melvern, Conspiracy to Murder, p. 224.
43 African Rights, Rwanda: Death, Despair and Defiance, p. 665.
44 African Rights, Rwanda: Death, Despair and Defiance, p. 708.
45 Darryl Li, “Echoes of Violence,” in Mills and Brunner, eds, The New Killing Fields,
p. 125.
46 Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers, p. 225.
47 Adam Jones, “Gender and Genocide in Rwanda,” in Jones, ed., Gendercide and Genocide
(Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2004), p. 123.
48 African Rights, Rwanda: Not So Innocent, p. 88.
49 Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis, pp. 231–32.
50 See Des Forges, Leave None to Tell the Story, p. 734.
51 Linda Melvern wrote that “the French operation included everything UNAMIR needed.
There were more than 2,500 elite soldiers from the French Foreign Legion, paratroopers,
marines and special forces, all equipped with state-of-the-art weaponry, communications,
one hundred armoured vehicles, heavy mortars, helicopters, and even jet aircraft. There
was an armada of cargo aircraft.” Melvern, Conspiracy to Murder, p. 243.
52 Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis, p. 267.
53 Michela Wrong, In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in Mobutu’s
Congo (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), p. 245.
54 See Marie Béatrice Umutesi, Surviving the Slaughter: The Ordeal of a Rwandan Refugee in
Zaire, trans. Julia Emerson (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004).
55 Scherrer, Genocide and Crisis, p. 198.
56 Melvern, Conspiracy to Murder, pp. 250–51.
57 “The Road out of Hell,” The Economist, March 27, 2004.
58 Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers, p. 261.
59 Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis, p. 370.
60 Joanne O’Connor, “Quest for Justice in Rwanda Moves Slowly But Surely,” TheLawyer.
com, 1 June 2004. http://www.thelawyer.com/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=109910andd=11andh
= 24andf=46.
61 Melvern, Conspiracy to Murder, p. 251.
HOLOCAUST IN RWANDA
249
62 On the so-called “media trials,” see Dina Temple-Raston, Justice on the Grass: Three
Rwandan Journalists, Their Trial for War Crimes and a Nation’s Quest for Redemption
(New York: The Free Press, 2005).
63 Robyn Dixon, “AIDS a Cruel Echo of ’94 Rwanda Genocide,” Los Angeles Times, May
2, 2004.
HOLOCAUST IN RWANDA
250
BOX 9A CONGO AND DARFUR
In 2005, as this book was being prepared for publication, genocide again stalked
Africa. A brutal counter-insurgency war in Darfur – a western region of Sudan,
Africa’s largest country – had sparked international condemnation and
application of the “genocide” label, but only limited international intervention.
Probably over 100,000 people had died – perhaps as many as 350,000.
To the southwest, Congo was again threatening to descend into full-scale war,
as Rwanda’s army staged another invasion, supposedly to suppress remnants of
the Hutu forces that had murdered a million Tutsis in 1994 (Chapter 9). The
complex and excruciatingly destructive conflict(s) in Congo had killed between
3.8 million and 4.7 million people over six years, according to the International
Rescue Committee (IRC).
1
Even the lower estimate represented the destruction
of “far more lives than any other conflict since the Second World War.”
2
■
CONGO AND “AFRICA’S WORLD WAR”
Congo was the backdrop for one of the greatest but least-known genocides in
modern history – the Belgian “rubber terror” (see Chapter 2). After indepen-
dence from Belgium in 1960, Congo fell under the sway of an army colonel,
Mobutu Sese Seko. Mobutu proved to be corrupt and megalomaniacal, “a
ruthless crook who fitted his palace with a nuclear shelter, hired [the] Concorde
for shopping trips and so gutted the treasury that inflation between October
1990 and December 1995 totalled 6.3 billion per cent.”
3
The catalyst for Mobutu’s downfall came from the eastern boundary of
Congo’s vast territory, thousands of kilometers from Kinshasa, the capital. In the
final stages of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, as Tutsi rebel forces closed in from
the north and east, Hutu génocidaires staged a mass evacuation of populations
under their control, across the Congolese border to the city of Goma (see
Chapter 9). Ironically, it was this humanitarian crisis that galvanized the world,
not the genocide against Tutsis. Ironically, too, the outside aid that flooded in
was instrumental in permitting the génocidaires to reconstitute themselves as a
terrorist force, brutally controlling the refugee population and launching attacks
against Tutsis in both Congo and Rwanda.
In the face of this threat, in 1997 Rwanda assisted the overthrow of the
Mobutu regime by Laurent Désiré Kabila, viewed as an effective Rwandan proxy
HOLOCAUST IN RWANDA
251
and partner in the struggle against Hutu killers. En route to Kinshasa, Kabila’s
force and the Rwandan army rampaged against Hutu populations in eastern
Congo. By one estimate, some 200,000 people died.
4
Once in power, Kabila fell under the sway of Hutu representatives in
Kinshasa, supporting renewed cross-border killing operations in Rwanda.
5
Rwanda soon began planning a coup d’état against its former protégé. An
attempted drive on Kinshasa by Rwandan forces and anti-Kabila Congolese
was halted only by the military intervention of Angola and Zimbabwe. Together
with Namibia and Chad, these represented the coalition that maintained Kabila
in power until his 2001 assassination. (He was succeeded by his son Joseph.)
Meanwhile, Rwanda, Uganda, and Burundi lined up with the anti-Kabila rebels
N
Cen. African
Rep.
Congo
CM
Sudan
Kinshasa
Luanda
Brazzaville
Bangui
Bujumbura
Uele River
Congo
River
Ubangi
River
Congo
River
Bumba
Kisangani
300 mi
300 km
DEMOCRATIC
REPUBLIC
of the
CONGO
Kwa
River
Kasai
River
Lualaba
River
Lake
Tanganyika
Lake Kivu
Lake Edward
Lake
Albert
Lake
Mweru
Goma
Bukavu
Kalemie
Likasi
Kamina
Lubumbashi
RW
BI
TZ
Zambia
Angola
Mbuji-Mayi
Kananga
Hebo
Kikwit
Matadi
Mbandaka
Atlantic
Ocean
UGGA
EQUATOR
Map 9a.1 Congo
Source: Map provided by WorldAtlas.com
HOLOCAUST IN RWANDA
252
who dominated the eastern half of the country. Congo had become “Africa’s
world war.” It was a continental struggle that “reached almost without inter-
ruption from the Red Sea to the Atlantic Ocean.”
6
This was also a prototypical “new war,” of the kind examined in Chapter 12.
Clashes between major concentrations of armed forces were rare. Many of
the killers were paramilitaries and freebooters, often cut adrift from more tradi-
tional military forces. Others were government troops who felt abandoned
by central authorities in Kinshasa: “Paid poorly, if at all, undisciplined and
feeling abandoned, these fighters calculate they have more to gain from looting
and shooting than maintaining the fiction of an integrated national army.”
7
Internecine conflicts between these armed groups provoked refugee flows
numbering in the tens of thousands as recently as January 2005. Warlordism was
rife amidst state collapse, with the Congolese government unable to “make [and]
enforce laws, maintain order, deliver services, or ensure security.”
8
The rich mineral resources of Congo proved an irresistible lure – “literally a
goldmine”
9
– for local militias and their foreign patrons. The spoils were such
as to cause a falling-out between Rwanda and Uganda over how to divide
them.
10
Both countries have experienced miraculous leaps in their export of key
commodities – diamonds, gold, timber, and coltan (an ore used in computer
chips and cell phones) – at levels that exceed total domestic production,
providing vivid evidence of the pillaging.
11
Starvation and disease caused millions of deaths in the Congo wars, but tens
or hundreds of thousands also died at the hands of rebel militias and the
government. The forces of the FDLR (the Democratic Forces for the Liberation
of Rwanda, born from the fleeing génocidaires of 1994) staged many attacks;
12
but it was the RCD rebels (the Congolese Rally for Democracy, supported by
Rwanda and Uganda) that committed the most extensive atrocities against
civilians. In 1999, UN Special Investigator Robert Garreton accused the rebels
of running torture centers that amounted to “extermination” sites. Garreton
declared: “The rebel forces must understand that they do not have any popular
support and that they are seen as aggressors who have placed the people under
a climate of terror.”
13
■
DARFUR
For half a century, Sudan has been racked by a civil war that many observers have
characterized as genocidal – between the Muslim Arab-dominated north (home
to the capital, Khartoum) and the predominantly Christian and animist south.
In recent decades, northern imposition of Arabic and shariah, or Islamic law,
have fueled southern rebellion. The conflict has exacted “a huge and terrible
human toll,” with possibly two million killed. Brookings Institution scholar
Francis Deng characterized it in 2001 as “the worst humanitarian disaster in
the world today.”
14
HOLOCAUST IN RWANDA
253
Curiously, though, it was a smaller-scale tragedy elsewhere in Sudan – in the
remote region of Darfur, bordering Chad – that captured world attention in
2004. Darfur also provoked the most voluble debate over application of the
“genocide” label since Rwanda in 1994.
For decades, sporadic conflict flickered in Darfur between Arab pastoralists
and African agriculturalists. The onset of recurring drought exacerbated
tensions, pushing Arab northerners further into the African heartland. Feelings
of marginalization, invasion, and exploitation provided a constituency for the
rebellion that first erupted in June 2003, led by a still-shadowy group called the
Sudan Liberation Army (SLA).
SLA attacks on Sudanese government offices and police provoked a violent
reaction from the military government in Khartoum, led by General Omar
N
Khartoum
Nile
River
White Nile River
Blue Nile
River
300 mi
300 km
DARFUR
SUDAN
Red
Sea
Nyala
Wa
-
w
Libya
Chad
C.A.R.
Dem. Rep.
of the Congo
Egypt
Uganda
Kenya
Ethiopia
Erit.
Sau.
Ar.
Al Fa
-
shir
Juba
Bor
Nimule
Malaka
-
l
Al Ubayyid¸
Ku
-
st
-
ı
Wad Madan
-
ı
Kasala
Atbara
Wa
-
d
-
ıH¸ alfa
-
H¸ ala
-
’ib
Port Sudan
Sawa
-
kin
Map 9a.2 Darfur
Source: Reproduced with the permission of the Minister of Public Works and Government Services,
2005
HOLOCAUST IN RWANDA
254
al-Bashir. Employing time-honored counter-insurgency strategies (precisely
those that Khartoum had used for decades in the conflict with South Sudan),
the government equipped an Arab militia, the Janjaweed, to mount attacks
on African villages. (The name Janjaweed “translates roughly as ‘evil men on
horseback,’ [and] was chosen to inspire fear.”)
15
The assaults were carried out
with the participation of Sudanese military forces, equipped with bombers and
helicopters.
The Janjaweed behaved much as Serb paramilitary units did in invading
Bosnian Muslim or Albanian Kosovar villages (see Chapter 8). Adult male non-
combatants were rounded up and slaughtered in gendercidal massacres.
16
African women were raped on a massive scale, by assailants who called them
“black slaves” and “rap[ed] them so that they [would] bear Arab children.”
17
Civilian populations were dispossessed and put to flight.
A US State Department report of September 2004 found that 61 percent of
refugees interviewed had witnessed a member of their family killed (over-
whelmingly a husband, son, or brother); 67 percent had seen others outside their
family killed.
18
The death-toll is a matter of dispute, with estimates ranging
from 70,000 at the low end to 400,000, including those killed by disease and
hunger, as of April 2005.
19
Hundreds of villages had been destroyed, damaged,
and abandoned, leaving two million people uprooted and too terrified to return.
With the collapse of agriculture, millions were dependent on outside food aid.
As food supplies ran desperately short, “genocide by attrition” began to replace
direct killing.
20
In the face of the systematic atrocities, a consensus was forged among
nongovernmental organizations, and some governments, that the campaign
was genocidal.
21
According to the Aegis Trust in Britain, this conclusion was
unavoidable. “Was the killing intentional? Yes. Was it systematically organised
by the al-Bashir regime using government-armed Janjaweed militias, bombers
and helicopter gunships? Yes. Were the victims chosen because of their ethnic
and racial identity? Yes. This, in short is genocide. The genocide continues.”
22
Famously, in September 2004, US Secretary of State Colin Powell agreed. “We
concluded – I concluded – that genocide has been committed in Darfur, and
that the government of Sudan and the Janjaweed bear responsibility and that
genocide may still be occurring.”
23
However, as the New York Times pointed out,
Powell’s statement came “with the quick assurance that this didn’t mean the
United States was prepared to take any further action.”
24
Powell’s declaration
was followed by the virtual disappearance of Darfur from the US political
agenda – though in this respect, America was hardly alone.
■
CONCLUSION
Positive steps were taken in Congo in 2004–05. Congolese President Joseph
Kabila had struck agreements to draw most rebel forces into a national
HOLOCAUST IN RWANDA
255
government. A 16,000-strong UN intervention force, MONUC, which
deployed to eastern Congo in 1999, gained notoriety in the first years of its
mandate for standing by ineffectually while civilians were oppressed and even
massacred before its eyes. By 2005 it was finally adopting a firmer stance against
the rampaging militias, and had succeeded in quelling some of their violence.
Its resources and ambit were limited, however.
25
As for the Rwandan Hutu
génocidaires, they seemed to be tiring of the struggle. In March 2005, the
dominant faction announced that it was prepared to return to Rwanda and join
the mainstream political process.
After the noisy international debate over the “genocide” label, Darfur again
slipped to the margins of diplomacy and public concern. “For the world at large
Darfur was and remained the quintessential ‘African crisis’: distant, esoteric,
extremely violent, rooted in complex ethnic and historical factors which few
understood, and devoid of any identifiable practical interest for the rich
countries.”
26
An African Union peacekeeping force, just 6,700-strong in a
territory as large as France, lacked a mandate to protect civilians and was instead
reduced to “watching the tragedy unfold.”
27
The UN Security Council, “despite
threatening sanctions . . . has done nothing, preferring to allow the African
Union to take the lead in a hopelessly under-equipped mission.”
28
Both China
and Russia, among Council veto-wielders, were deeply opposed to any inter-
vention not approved by the Sudanese government. Meanwhile, some 10,000
people a month were dying “as the bombing, slaughter and rape continue[d].”
29
■
FURTHER STUDY
John F. Clark, ed., The African Stakes of the Congo War. London: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2004. Wide-ranging edited collection on the regional
implications of war and genocide in Congo.
Alex De Waal, Famine That Kills: Darfur, Sudan (rev. edn). Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2004. Updated edition of an important study.
Gérard Prunier, Darfur: The Ambiguous Genocide. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 2005. Concise introduction by the author of The Rwanda
Crisis (see Chapter 9).
Michela Wrong, In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in
Mobutu’s Congo. New York: Perennial, 2002. Insightful journalistic account
of life in Congo (then Zaire) under the Mobutu dictatorship.
■
NOTES
1 International Rescue Committee statistics cited in “An Almost Hopeless Case,”
The Economist, January 22, 2005 (“at least 3.8 million people”); James Astill,
“Conflict in Congo Has Killed 4.7m, Charity Says,” Guardian, April 8, 2003,
HOLOCAUST IN RWANDA
256
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Print/0,3858,4643138,00.html (“a total of 4.7 million
people have died”).
2 Astill, “Conflict in Congo.”
3 “Africa’s Unmended Heart,” The Economist, June 11, 2005.
4 Kisangani Emizer, cited in Ola Olsson and Heather Congdon Fors, “Congo: The
Prize of Predation,” Journal of Peace Research, 41: 3 (2004), p. 325.
5 Christian P. Scherrer, Genocide and Crisis in Central Africa: Conflict Roots, Mass
Violence, and Regional War (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002), p. 267.
6 International Crisis Group (hereafter ICG), “How Kabila Lost His Way: The
Performance of Laurent Désiré Kabila’s Government,” background paper, May 21,
1999. See also Jeremy M. Weinstein, “Africa’s ‘Scramble for Africa’: Lessons of a
Continental War,” World Policy Journal, 17: 2 (summer 2000), pp. 11–20; Thomas
M. Callaghy, “Life and Death in the Congo: Understanding a Nation’s Collapse,”
Foreign Affairs, 80: 5 (2001), pp. 143–49.
7 Rory Carroll, “Violence Threatens to Engulf Congo,” Guardian, November 26,
2004. http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5072001-110889,00.html.
8 Weinstein, “Africa’s ‘Scramble for Africa.’”
9 Pro-RPF newspaper reporting on alleged corruption and “shameful degeneration”
among Ugandan forces in Congo; cited in ICG, “Africa’s Seven-nation War,”
report, May 21, 1999, p. 19.
10 See Lara Santoro, “False Dawn,” The New Republic, July 3, 2000.
11 See Olsson and Fors, “Congo: The Prize of Predation.” For an overview of the
smuggling networks in Rwanda and Uganda, see Francoise Misser, “Looking for
Scapegoats,” African Business, 259 (November 2000).
12 See, e.g., Craig Timberg, “Rwanda’s Tormentors Emerge from the Forest to Haunt
Congo: Hutu Guerrillas Find New Victims,” Washington Post, February 10, 2005.
Throughout the war, Rwanda exploited the 1994 genocide to justify invading its
giant neighbor as and when it chose. “We know that there is an argument that the
FDLR does not constitute a threat to the Rwandan government,” stated Rwandan
special envoy Richard Sezibera in December 2004. “Fine! But for us we start
counting the dead from the 1 million plus in the 1994 genocide. In our view, even
one death today caused by the FDLR is a continuation of the genocide.” ICG,
“Back to the Brink in Congo,” Africa Briefing, December 17, 2004, p. 2.
13 ICG, “Africa’s Seven-nation War,” p. 18.
14 Francis M. Deng, “Sudan – Civil War and Genocide,” in William L. Hewitt,
Defining the Horrific: Readings on Genocide and Holocaust in the Twentieth Century
(Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson, 2004), pp. 223–24.
15 Scott Straus, “Darfur and the Genocide Debate,” Foreign Affairs, 84: 1 (2004),
p. 126. According to Gérard Prunier, “Sociologically the Janjaweed seem to have
been of six main origins: former bandits and highwaymen who had been ‘in
the trade’ since the 1980s; demobilized soldiers from the regular army; young
members of Arab tribes having a running land conflict with a neighbouring
‘African’ group . . . common criminals who were pardoned and released from
gaol if they joined the militia; fanatical members of the Tajammu al-Arabi [‘(Arab
Union), a militantly racist and pan-Arabist organization which stressed the “Arab”
character of the province’]; and young unemployed ‘Arab’ men, quite similar
to those who joined the rebels on the ‘African’ side.” Gérard Prunier, Darfur:
The Ambiguous Genocide (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), pp. 45,
97–98.
16 For a compendium of reportage on gender-selective massacres and other atrocities,
see Adam Jones/Gendercide Watch, “Gendercide in Darfur,” http://www.
gendercide.org/darfur01.htm.
HOLOCAUST IN RWANDA
257
17 Public International Law and Policy Group (PILPG), “Genocide in Darfur: A Legal
Analysis,” September 2004, http://www.africafiles.org/printableversion.asp?id=
6727.
18 State Department statistics cited in PILPG, “Genocide in Darfur.”
19 The lower death-toll, based on rough UN computations, is dismissed by Prunier as
“obsolete” and unverified. He cites a figure of 310,000 killed by the beginning of
2005 (see Prunier, Darfur: The Ambiguous Genocide, pp. 151–52). For calculations
of the 400,000 figure, see “Darfur’s Real Death Toll,” Washington Post (editorial),
April 24, 2005, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A12485-
2005Apr23.html.
20 Prunier, Darfur: The Ambiguous Genocide, p. 117.
21 “Organizations arguing that the massacres in Darfur fulfil the international
legal definition of genocide include Physicians for Human Rights and the UK-based
campaigning group Justice Africa. Human Rights Watch and the International
Crisis Group have not employed the term ‘genocide,’ but both say Sudanese
government forces and Janjawid militias are responsible for crimes against
humanity, war crimes, and ‘ethnic cleansing.’ Amnesty International has called for
the setting up of an international inquiry to examine charges of war crimes and
‘allegations of genocide.’” John Ryle, “Disaster in Darfur,” The New York Review of
Books, 51: 13 (August 12, 2004), http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17326.
22 Aegis Trust report quoted in Anne Penketh, “Darfur: Never Again?,” The
Independent, January 26, 2005.
23 Terence Neilan, “Powell Says Sudan Abuses Qualify as Genocide,” The New York
Times, September 9, 2004.
24 Scott Anderson, “How Did Darfur Happen?,” New York Times, October 17, 2004.
25 See Edmund Sanders, “UN Stretched Thin in Congo,” Los Angeles Times,
September 12, 2005.
26 Prunier, Darfur: The Ambiguous Genocide, p. 124.
27 Prunier, Darfur: The Ambiguous Genocide, p. 145.
28 Penketh, “Darfur: Never Again?” Rwanda is second only to Nigeria among
contributors of troops for the peacekeeping mission. The Rwandan government has
used its participation in the Darfur protection force to gain “leverage with which to
pursue its interests more assertively in its immediate neighbourhood without risking
serious censure.” In other words, as a quid pro quo for its intervention in Darfur,
Rwanda is able to evade criticism of its “reckless” and often atrocious policies in
Congo. ICG, “Back to the Brink,” p. 5.
29 “Justice in Darfur,” The Economist, February 5, 2005.
PART 3 SOCIAL SCIENCE PERSPECTIVES
■
Psychological
Perspectives
It is too late to stop the technology. It is to the psychology that we should now turn.
Jonathan Glover
Understanding genocide requires getting inside the minds of those who commit
it, and those who seek to prevent or limit it. This is the province of psychology.
Not surprisingly, many of the more prominent scholars and analysts of genocide are
psychologists and psychiatrists, including Israel Charny, Ervin Staub, Roy Baumeister,
Robert Jay Lifton, and James Waller.
In approaching psychological contributions in this chapter, I will put aside one
fruitful line of inquiry, focusing on the “authoritarian personality” and the mass
psychology of fascism. Associated with central twentieth-century figures such as
Theodor Adorno, Wilhelm Reich, and Erich Fromm, these investigations located
fascism’s psychological roots in childhood experiences of parental authoritarianism
and repression. They also emphasized mechanisms of psychological projection,
displacing onto others the violence derived from a lack of personal self-esteem (or,
alternatively, hysterical narcissism), as well as various sexual neuroses. I do not plumb
this literature here, partly because space is limited, and partly because it is well covered
by James Waller in his outstanding book Becoming Evil.
1
However, elements of this
framework seep into the following discussion, which considers in detail mechanisms
of narcissism, greed, fear, and humiliation in fueling and explaining genocide. Some
of the earlier Reichian attention to familial and social-psychological dynamics is
paralleled in the closing discussion of genocidal perpetrators and rescuers.
261
CHAPTER 10
■
NARCISSISM, GREED, AND FEAR
What motivates génocidaires? I see four psychological elements as essential: narcissism,
greed, fear, and humiliation. The first three are addressed here, with a separate section
reserved for genocide and humiliation.
Narcissism
The Greek god Narcissus became so enraptured with his own reflection in a pool
that he “fell in love with himself, and not being able to find consolation, he died of
sorrow by the same pool.”
2
The myth speaks to our propensity for hubristic self-love,
a phenomenon first studied in a psychological and psychiatric context by Sigmund
Freud (1856–1939). Freud described narcissism as a formative and necessary stage
of ego development, but also sketched notes on a narcissism of minor differences. This
refers, in Anton Blok’s summary, to “the fact that the fiercest struggles often take place
between individuals, groups and communities that differ very little – or between
which the differences have greatly diminished.”
3
Scholars of genocide are often struck
by how groups that seem close linguistically, geographically, and/or religiously can
succumb to bitter intercommunal conflict: Hutus and Tutsis, Serbs and Croatians,
Catholics and Protestants. At a deeper level, Freud observed that “the communal
feeling of groups requires, in order to complete it, hostility towards some extraneous
minority.”
4
The psychological dynamic by which the “Self ” and the “We” are defined
against the “Other” is fundamental to genocide.
Of equal significance is malignant or pathological narcissism, in which others exist
only to fortify, magnify, and idolize the self.
5
Profound insecurity, anxiety, and unease
often accompany this form of narcissism – a fear that without validation by others,
the self will be undermined or annihilated.
6
But this seems to vanish at the extremes
of malignant narcissism, where true psychopathy lies. This is a murderous egotism,
incapable of empathy with others, that considers human destruction inconsequential
if it serves to increase personal power and glory.
Malignant narcissism and psychopathy are common among génocidaires in
modern history. Consider Adolf Hitler, whose stunted, injured ego found transcen-
dence in holocaust. (How Hitler, the failed artist and rootless ex-soldier, must have
reveled in the version of the Lord’s Prayer devised by the League of German Girls:
“Adolf Hitler, you are our great Leader. Thy name makes the enemy tremble. Thy
Third Reich comes, thy will alone is law upon earth . . .”!)
7
Consider as well Joseph
Stalin and Mao Zedong, “fanatics, poets, paranoiacs, peasants risen to rule empires
whose history obsessed them, careless killers of millions”;
8
or the Hutu Power
extremists of Rwanda, convinced that their crushing of Tutsi “cockroaches” would
enshrine their version of manifest destiny.
Collective pathological narcissism is also a factor in genocide. Shifting the level of
analysis and diagnosis from the individual to the collective is a controversial move.
But it seems apt when a majority or dominant minority of a nation’s citizens hold that
their country is somehow innately superior, gifted by God or destiny, the bearers of
PSYCHOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES
262
a sole truth, or limitlessly capable. The philosopher Sam Vaknin has summarized the
criteria for collective pathological narcissism:
The group as a whole, or members of the group . . . feel grandiose and self-
important....[They are] obsessed with group fantasies of unlimited success,
fame, fearsome power or omnipotence, unequalled brilliance, bodily beauty or
performance, or ideal, everlasting, all-conquering ideals or political theories....
[They] are firmly convinced that the group is unique. ...[They] require excessive
admiration, adulation, attention and affirmation – or, failing that, wish to be
feared and to be notorious. ...[They] feel entitled. They expect unreasonable or
special and favorable priority treatment. They demand automatic and full com-
pliance with expectations. . . . They rarely accept responsibility for their actions
...[They] are devoid of empathy. They are unable or unwilling to identify with
or acknowledge the feelings and needs of other groups. ...[They] are arrogant
and sport haughty behaviors or attitudes coupled with rage when frustrated,
contradicted, punished, limited, or confronted. . . . [All of] this often leads to anti-
social behavior, cover-ups, and criminal activities on a mass scale.
9
One of the countries of which I am a citizen, Great Britain, was probably the world
leader in collective pathological narcissism during the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. Generations of schoolchildren grew up imbibing their elders’ conviction
that Britain was God’s gift to humankind, particularly to the darker races it was
destined to rule. British culture and civilization were supreme, and British men and
women were uniquely noble, brave, virtuous, and incorruptible. Traces of this
mentality persist even in the post-colonial era, and can resurge with virulent passion
in times of crisis, as I observed firsthand on a visit to Britain during the Falklands/
Malvinas War of 1982.
10
In the past century, the societies that have most dramatically evinced a tendency
towards collective pathological narcissism are three totalitarian states – Nazi Germany
(1933–45), Stalinist Russia (1928–53), and Maoist China (1949–76) – and, since
1945, a democratic one, the United States.
11
The presence of the US in this list,
like its British predecessor, suggests that collective pathological narcissism is not
tied to a particular political system or ideology. Psychological theorist Robert Jay
Lifton has analyzed the contemporary US variant in his book Superpower Syndrome,
pointing to:
a bizarre American collective mind-set that extends our very real military power
into a fantasy of cosmic control, a mind-set all too readily tempted by an
apocalyptic mission. The symptoms are of a piece, each consistent with the larger
syndrome: unilateralism in all-important decisions, including war-making ones;
the use of high technology to secure the ownership of death and history; a sense
of entitlement concerning the right to identify and destroy all those considered
to be terrorists or friends of terrorists, while spreading “freedom” and virtues seen
as preeminently ours throughout the world; the right to decide who may possess
weapons of mass destruction and who may not, and to take military action using
nuclear weapons if necessary against any nation that has them or is thought to be
PSYCHOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES
263
manufacturing them; and underneath all of these symptoms, a righteous vision
of ridding the world of evil and purifying it spiritually and politically.
12
This mindset has been intensified and fortified by the events of September 11, 2001,
but it is not a product of them. Rather, distinctively American ideologies of unlimited
space and power, combined with the country’s unchallenged superpower status since
the Second World War, have generated a consensus (though very far from a universal
view) that the US is destined to dominate the world and prevent any challenge to
its hegemony. In past epochs, the mentality has spawned genocidal or proto-genocidal
atrocities against Native Americans, Filipinos, Indochinese, and others. Will it one
day produce nuclear war and “omnicide” (Chapter 2)? In light of the most recent
framing of American “national security” doctrine (post-9/11),
13
and the explicit
envisioning of nuclear strikes against countries alleged to be harboring terrorists or
developing weapons of mass destruction,
14
the prospect is not far-fetched.
Greed
“These people are like vultures swarming down, their eyes bleary, their tongues
hanging out with greed, to feed upon the Jewish carcass.” So wrote an appalled
German businessman, observing the Nazi “Aryanization” of Jewish properties.
15
But
few Germans shared his scruples. Most viewed the dispossession of the Jews of
Germany as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and made the most of it: “Looted
Jewish property was a magnet which attracted millions brought up to believe in the
myth of the Jewish wealth.”
16
Not only did the Nazis encourage “Aryan” Germans to exploit the Jewish plight,
but they took full advantage themselves. Even as the Holocaust was reaching its peak
in 1941–42, “Hitler himself was not above sanctioning opportunities to extort foreign
currency in return for ransoming very rich Jews.”
17
In the Nazi death camps, Jews
were robbed not only of their few remaining possessions, but of their hair, which
was sold for mattress stuffing – and (after death) of the gold fillings in their teeth,
melted down for bullion.
Greed is “an overriding theme in human affairs,”
18
and a principal motive of
genocidal perpetrators and bystanders alike. The opportunity to strip victims of their
wealth and property – either by looting it outright, or purchasing it at desperation
prices – and to occupy their forcibly vacated dwellings appears again and again in
accounts of genocide. As Armenians were rounded up and massacred or driven off
on death marches (Chapter 4), the US consul in Trebizond, Oscar Heizer, reported:
“A crowd of Turkish women and children follow the police about like a lot of vultures
and seize anything they can lay their hands on and when the more valuable things
are carried out of the house by the police they rush in and take the balance. I see this
performance every day with my own eyes.”
19
At the height of Stalin’s purges in the
Soviet Union (Chapter 5), there was “frequent house-moving because every execution
created a vacant apartment and dacha which were eagerly occupied by survivors and
their aspirational Party housewives, ambitious for grander accommodation.”
20
In
Rwanda in 1994 (Chapter 9), Tutsi rural victims “had land and at times cows....
PSYCHOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES
264
Somebody had to get these lands and those cows after their owners were dead,”
a significant incentive “in a poor and increasingly overpopulated country.”
21
“[We]
had tasted comfort and overflowing plenty,” one Hutu killer recalled. “Greed had
corrupted us.”
22
Greed is more than a desire for material goods beyond those necessary for survival.
It is intimately connected to the hunger for power, domination, and prestige. “Man
does not strive for power only in order to enrich himself economically,” noted the
sociologist Max Weber. “Power, including economic power, may be valued ‘for its own
sake.’ Very frequently the striving for power is also conditioned by the social ‘honor’
it entails.”
23
“Functionalist” analysts of the Jewish Holocaust emphasize the eagerness
with which underlings sought to implement Hitler’s grand plans, generating a
dynamic that was to a considerable degree independent of direct orders.
24
Simon
Sebag Montefiore notes that in Stalinist Russia, a “Terror entrepreneurialism” reigned,
with a “succession of ambitious torturers who were only too willing to please and
encourage Stalin by finding Enemies and killing them for him.”
25
Often these indi-
viduals were designated next for execution; but there were always upwardly mobile
men and women waiting to take their place.
26
Even a brief moment in the sun may be enough to motivate the génocidaires,
as with the “street boys, rag-pickers, [and] car-washers” whom Gérard Prunier
described as vengefully targeting Tutsis in Rwanda’s genocide (see p. 243).
27
Greed
reflects objective material circumstances, but also, like narcissism, the core strivings
of ego. Greed is never satiated; but when it is fed, one feels validated, successful – even
omnipotent. Perhaps the only force that can truly match it as a motivator for genocide
is fear.
Fear
“No power so effectively robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as
fear,” wrote British statesman Edmund Burke.
28
To grasp the central role of fear in
genocide, it is worth distinguishing between mortal terror and existential dread. Mortal
terror is fear of a threat to physical being and integrity. Existential dread revolves
around our sense of personal identity, destiny, and social place; it evokes, or threatens
to evoke, feelings of shame, dishonor, and humiliation.
Mortal terror is “animal fear,” perhaps in a double sense. In a form that is often
hard to distinguish from mere reflex, it is common across species, but it attains a
particular pitch of intensity in the human animal, apparently the only one capable
of foreseeing its own death.
29
In the eyes of some scholars and philosophers, this
“death anxiety” is the worm in humanity’s psychic apple – and a key factor in
genocide. “Driven by nameless, overwhelming fears,” wrote Israel Charny, “men turn
to the primitive tools of self-protection, including the belief that they may spare
themselves the terrible fate of death by sacrificing another instead of themselves.”
30
We may first have gleaned a more immediate form of animal fear from predatory
animals themselves. In her book Blood Rites, Barbara Ehrenreich traces phenomena
as disparate as separation anxiety in infants, religious rituals including human
sacrifice, and intercommunal warfare to the terrifying encounter of prehumans and
PSYCHOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES
265
primitive humans with predatory beasts. “Nothing gets our attention like the prospect
of being ripped apart, sucked dry, and transformed into another creature’s meal,” she
writes.
31
The predator may have been the original “Other,” transformed – as humans
gained the upper hand over the animal kingdom – into the predatory out-group.
The human “Other” in turn bounded and delineated the in-group (clan, tribe, ethnic
group) where one finds sustenance and support, including in communal self-
defense.
32
Evolutionary psychologists – those who apply evolutionary biology to
psychology – deploy such connections to argue that “human behavior in the present
is generated by universal reasoning circuits that exist because they solved adaptive
problems in the past.”
33
But social psychologists – studying people in situations of
group interaction – have also found that subjects “who believe others will attack them
respond with more aggression than they direct against targets who do not elicit such
a belief.” These phenomena are inextricably tied to intercommunal violence and
genocide:
Fear of the immediate or more distant future is a pivotal element in a number of
approaches to ethnic warfare....Fear induces people to support even very costly
violence, because the choice seems to be between becoming a victim or becoming
a participant....According to this approach, a high degree of affect is expressed
when the stakes are large (genocide involves large stakes), and so emotion follows
a rational assessment by ordinary people of their situation. The improbability of
genocide is not decisive, for the stakes are too high to chance it.
34
Mortal terror, heightened and manipulated by genocide’s architects, is a common –
though not ubiquitous – feature of genocidal killing. Two vivid examples are the
Balkan wars and Rwandan genocide of the 1990s (see Chapters 8–9). Prominent
among Serbs’ historical memories were the genocidal atrocities inflicted against them
by the fascist Ustasha regime in Croatia during the Second World War. The revival
of Ustasha-style symbolism and rhetoric by Franjo Tudjman’s Croatian nationalist
regime provoked deep anxieties, heightened when discrimination began against
Serb professionals and officials within Croatia. In these varied ways “the Croats
signaled the reasonableness of Serb fears,” which was then “manipulated by Slobodan
Milosevic, who needed the Croat issue to secure his power.”
35
The Rwandan holocaust of 1994 occurred in the aftermath of a massive blood-
letting in neighboring Burundi, where between 50,000 and 100,000 civilians,
overwhelmingly Hutus, had been massacred by the Tutsi-dominated military
following a failed coup. Some 350,000 Hutus fled to Rwanda, bringing firsthand
accounts of atrocities; among these refugees were some of the most unrestrained
genocidal killers of Tutsis in 1994. The slaughter revived memories of an even greater
killing of Hutus in 1972, when an “eliticidal” attempt was made to exterminate
virtually all Hutus who had education or professional status (mainly adult males).
Combined with the Tutsi-led rebel invasion of Rwanda in 1990, an “image of the
Tutsi as the embodiment of a mortal danger . . . [was] hauntingly evident,” according
to René Lemarchand.
36
A final element added to the mix, at least for Rwanda’s Hutu
males, was the threat of mortal retribution from their leaders if they did not participate
in mass murder: “Many Hutu were driven to kill their Tutsi neighbors because they
PSYCHOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES
266
knew they had no other option; refusal to comply meant that they themselves would
be killed the next day.”
37
Even in the prototypical case of genocide against a completely defenseless
and objectively non-threatening population – the Jewish Holocaust – mortal terror
may have figured, though in heavily hystericized form. As Raul Hilberg notes, “the
Germans drew a picture of an international Jewry ruling the world and plotting
the destruction of Germany and German life.”
38
It may appear preposterous to
depict Jewish children, women, and elderly as in any sense a “threat” to the German
population. It was, however, easier to present adult Jewish males (in fact, any adult
males) in this fashion. This helps explain why, both within Germany and in the
Nazi-occupied territories of Eastern Europe, this demographic group was demonized
in the propaganda generated to guide the genocidal enterprise (see Chapter 13); and
why incarceration and physical extermination were first directed against this group.
Moreover, the intimate twinning of Jew and Bolshevik/communist in the Nazi
mindset brought a fear-evoking dimension that was not just hysterical, in that Soviet
Russia and Slavic civilization could be presented as a logical threat to the German
heartland. These ingredients were stirred together in a propaganda leaflet distributed
to German troops on the eastern front:
Anyone who has ever looked at the face of a red commissar knows what the
Bolsheviks are like. Here there is no need for theoretical expressions. We would
insult the animals if we described these mostly Jewish men as beasts. They are the
embodiment of the Satanic and insane hatred against the whole of noble humanity.
. . . The masses, whom they have sent to their deaths by making use of all means
at their disposal such as ice-cold terror and insane incitement, would have brought
an end to all meaningful life, had this eruption not been dammed at the last
moment.
39
Mortal terror also contains a strong element of psychological projection. One justifies
genocidal designs by imputing such designs to perceived opponents. The Tutsis/
Croatians/Jews/Bolsheviks must be killed because they harbor intentions to kill
us, and will do so if they are not stopped/prevented/annihilated. Before they are killed,
they are brutalized, debased, and dehumanized – turning them into something
resembling “subhumans” or “animals” and, by a circular logic, justifying their exter-
mination. Projection may also assist in displacing guilt and blame from genocidal
perpetrators to their victims.
40
Wolfgang Sofsky notes that the Nazis designated Jews
as the principal guards and hands-on oppressors of fellow Jews in the concentration
camps, as well as those (the Sonderkommandos) who carried out much of the industrial
processing of corpses in the death camps. It is “as though [the Nazi regime] wished
to prove that the members of the subrace accepted any degradation and even killed
one another: as though it wished to shift the burden of guilt onto the victims
themselves.”
41
The possibility of physical/psychological displacement and dispossession is
foundational to existential dread. “Desperation is a theme that runs through a great
deal of ethnic violence,” writes Donald Horowitz. “A good many groups are con-
vinced that they are or soon will be swamped, dominated, and dispossessed by their
PSYCHOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES
267
neighbors, perhaps even rendered extinct.”
42
Since the physical annihilation of the
individual is not impending, existential dread may seem to be subordinate to mortal
terror. To view it as such would be a serious error. Group identity is so supreme a value
that many individuals will choose to sacrifice their own lives to defend it. Likewise,
people will often choose physical death over existential shame, dishonor, or loss of
status and “respect” before one’s peers.
43
Time-honored codes of warriorhood,
masculine honor, and female virginity/sexual fidelity provide examples. Underlying
much existential dread is the fear of humiliation – a phenomenon that merits extended
treatment.
■
GENOCIDE AND HUMILIATION
If I’ve learned one thing covering world affairs, it’s this: The single most under-
appreciated force in international relations is humiliation.
Thomas Friedman, New York Times columnist
What Friedman perceived in global affairs, psychologists and others have explored
at the level of the individual. Humiliation has been defined by Evelin Lindner as
“the enforced lowering of a person or group, a process of subjugation that damages
or strips away their pride, honor or dignity.”
44
It is increasingly recognized as a
primary motivating force in human behavior, particularly violent behavior. Lindner
cited Suzanne Retzinger and Thomas Scheff’s finding that “humiliated fury” plays
a major role “in escalating conflict between individuals and nations.”
45
Robert Jay
Lifton wrote that “Humiliation involves feelings of shame and disgrace, as well as
helplessness in the face of abuse at the hands of a stronger party. These are among
the most painful and indelible of human emotions. He who has known extreme
shame and humiliation may forever struggle to recover a sense of agency and self-
respect.”
46
Psychologist James Gilligan, who conducted research among hardened
convicts in US prisons, went so far as to argue that “the basic psychological motive,
or cause, of violent behavior is the wish to ward off or eliminate the feeling of shame
and humiliation – a feeling that is painful and can even be intolerable and
overwhelming – and replace it with its opposite, the feeling of pride.”
47
Humiliation thus figures prominently in the most extreme manifestations of
human aggression: murder, war, genocide. Indeed, it is difficult to find a historical
or contemporary case of genocide in which humiliation is not a central motivating
force.
48
It suffices to consider the three best-known genocides of the twentieth
century:
• In the case of the Armenian genocide, the Young Turk authorities in
Constantinople were humiliated by military defeats in the Balkans and northern
Africa (1909–13), and by the secession of imperial territories including Serbia,
Bulgaria, and Albania. They were humiliated by the presence of a religious and
ethnic minority in their midst (Christian Armenians) that included a prosperous
“middleman” sector, and was supposedly assisting Russian designs on Turkey at
a time of imperial vulnerability (the First World War). Moreover, it appears that
PSYCHOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES
268
Turkish authorities and commentators today would experience a sense of
humiliation if they acknowledged and apologized for the Armenian genocide.
Humiliation is thus a key underpinning of genocide denial.
49
• The Nazis rose to national prominence by exploiting national humiliation,
which they translated into vengefulness and hatred against Germany’s supposed
tormentors. After four years of fighting in the First World War, the Germans
were stunned by their army’s collapse on the western front late in 1918. The
defeated forces flooding back across the Rhine formed the core of the extreme
right-wing groups that proliferated in the early 1920s – including one around
Adolf Hitler, whose writings and declarations are replete with horror at Germany’s
humiliation.
50
Outrage and humiliation greeted the imposition of the punitive
Versailles Treaty in 1919, further fueling extremist and revanchist movements.
Humiliation sought an outlet in scapegoating; the Nazis argued that it was the
Jews who had delivered Germany a treacherous “stab in the back” to prostrate
the country before the Western Allies, Bolshevism, and capitalism. As Germany
moved from hyperinflation in the 1920s to the Great Depression at decade’s end,
economic pressures and privation added to feelings of humiliation, especially
among men whose self-image was intimately bound up with their “provider”
status.
51
• In Rwanda under Belgian colonialism, Tutsis were taught that they were
descended from the “civilized” peoples of the Nile region, while Hutus were
unrefined bumpkins. Tutsis were depicted (and came to view themselves) as tall,
powerful, educated, attractive; Hutus were presented as the humiliating antithesis.
The 1959 revolution establishing Hutu political dominance was represented
as a vanquishing of humiliation for the Hutu masses; now Tutsis would be
put “in their place.” But when a Tutsi exile movement invaded from Rwanda in
1990, Hutu dominance was threatened. The descent into economic crisis around
the same time meant humiliating unemployment for hundreds of thousands of
Hutus – again especially poignant for adult men, who would be conscripted in
vast numbers as agents of the genocide.
It is not surprising, given the intense humiliation of the génocidaires, that gratuitous
and humiliating cruelties are routinely inflicted upon victims. Many students of the
Armenian, Jewish, and Rwandan holocausts are stunned by the care taken not only
to exterminate members of the target groups, but to strip them of dignity and inflict
maximum suffering before death. In part, as genocide scholar Jacques Semelin argues,
this reflects a desire to render victims “worthy” of genocide – that is, to reduce them
to the dirty/cowering/impotent status that the genocidal ideology sees as their
nature.
52
But it may also speak to feelings of humiliation, and a desire to transfer
that humiliation to the hated Other.
Humiliation also figures strongly in subaltern genocide, the “genocides by the
oppressed” mentioned in Chapter 1. There are, of course, both fantasies and realities
of oppression. Nearly every génocidaire considers himself or herself oppressed by the
target of genocide: Turks by Armenians, Germans by Jews, Khmers by Vietnamese.
In many cases, these framings are the spawn of myth and paranoia. In other instances,
there may be a more objective character to the convictions. Hutus in Rwanda had
PSYCHOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES
269
experienced social subordination and humiliation at Tutsi hands. The Kosovar
extremists who waged a low-level campaign of persecution and – arguably – genocide
against Serbs in Kosovo were motivated by years of Serb brutalization and
suppression. Islamist terrorism also carries a tinge of subaltern genocide: its exponents
keenly feel the humiliation of centuries of conquest and domination by Western
“Crusaders.” “What America is tasting now is only a copy of what we have tasted,”
declaims Osama bin Laden. “Our Islamic nation has been tasting the same for more
than 80 years, of humiliation and disgrace.”
53
Commentators have often wondered
how it is that relatively privileged Arabs – even those directly exposed to and
benefiting from the prosperity and cosmopolitanism of the West – can plan and
conduct terrorist attacks that may descend to the level of genocidal massacre.
Humiliation is key to understanding this phenomenon; the educated and privileged
may feel it even more strongly than the masses.
54
“The cruelest result of human bondage,” writes the political scientist James
C. Scott, “is that it transforms the assertion of personal dignity into a mortal risk.”
55
A further problem is that revolt against such bondage, aimed at vanquishing humil-
iation and re-establishing dignity and self-respect, can take murderous and genocidal
forms. To anticipate the discussion of genocide prevention in Chapter 16, subordinate
groups, while struggling legitimately for their rights and dignity, should be extremely
wary of the vengefulness that is often born of humiliation.
■
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PERPETRATORS
From our findings, we must conclude not only that such personalities are not unique
or insane, but also that they could be duplicated in any country of the world today.
Douglas Kelley, investigating psychiatrist at the Nuremberg Tribunal
for Nazi war criminals
Q. How do you shoot babies?
A. I don’t know. It’s just one of those things.
US soldier, participant in the genocidal massacre of hundreds of Vietnamese
civilians at My Lai (1968); interviewed by Mike Wallace of CBS
In 1992, Christopher Browning published his ground-breaking book Ordinary
Men, about a battalion of German police reservists and conscripts – mostly middle-
aged men too old for active military service – who functioned as a killing squad
on the eastern front in 1941–42. “The men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 were
the unlikeliest of mass murderers. They did not represent special selection or even
random selection. . . . They were simply ordinary people who went about completing
the murderous tasks assigned them with considerable indifference.”
56
As Daniel
Goldhagen demonstrated in Hitler’s Willing Executioners, these tasks included
corraling and executing Jews and “saboteurs,” including children and women, with
rifle shots to the back of the head. Often the men emerged spattered with blood
and brain matter. The sheer gruesomeness of the task led some to accept their
commanding officer’s offer to absent themselves from the slaughter without penalty.
PSYCHOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES
270
But surprisingly few bowed out: Browning estimates that 80 to 90 percent of the
battalion eventually participated in close-up mass killings of Jews. Others began by
feeling queasy, but accustomed themselves to the killing, even coming to enjoy it.
Some excused themselves initially, but subsequently returned. Most numbed
themselves with alcohol.
How to explain this routinized participation in acts of unimaginable horror?
Although criticized by Goldhagen for downplaying the role of Jew-hatred in the
murders, Browning did acknowledge that the “deluge of racist and anti-Semitic
propaganda” played a key role.
57
But he placed additional emphasis on “the mutually
intensifying effects of war and racism”; obedience to authority; peer pressure and the
“threat of isolation” from the group (with possibly mortal consequences in wartime);
machismo; and feelings of obligation, duty, and honor.
Among the research that Browning cited to support his thesis was the twentieth
century’s most famous series of psychological studies, conducted by Stanley Milgram
beginning in the early 1960s, and known ever since as “the Milgram experiments.”
58
The basic design was elegantly simple, yet open to complex variations. A mild-
mannered and agreeable middle-aged man, an accountant by profession, was
contracted and trained to serve as the “learner” of the experiments (Figure 10.1). He
was placed on one side of a wall, and a designated subject (the “teacher”) was seated
on the other, in front of a generator supposedly capable of administering shocks of
increasing voltage to the learner. “The generator had thirty different switches running
in fifteen-volt increments from 15 to 450 volts,” writes James Waller. “The higher
levels of shock were labeled in big letters as ‘Intense Shock,’ ‘Extreme Intensity
Shock,’ ‘Danger: Severe Shock,’ and, ominously, ‘XXX.’” To give the subject a taste
of the treatment he would supposedly be meting out to the learner, he or she was
administered a shock of 45 volts – “a level strong enough to be distinctly unpleasant.”
As the subject asked questions of the learner, incorrect answers were met with
commands from a white-coated authority figure (the “experimenter”) for the subject
to administer “shocks” of ever-greater intensity to the learner. “At 300 volts, the
learner vigorously pounded on the laboratory walls in protest....The learner’s
pounding was repeated after 315 volts. Afterward, he was not heard from again,”
but the subject was instructed to disregard this, and to continue to turn the dial.
59
The greatest shock of all was the experiment’s results, which have echoed through
the disciplines of psychology and sociology. An absolute majority of subjects –
twenty-six out of forty – “obeyed the orders of the experimenter to the end, proceeding
to punish the victim until they reached the most potent shock available on the
generator.”
60
Sometimes they did so stoically and dispassionately: the face of one
subject is described as “hard, impassive...showing total indifference as he subdues
the screaming learner and gives him shocks. He seems to derive no pleasure from the
act itself, only quiet satisfaction at doing his job properly.”
61
Most subjects, however,
displayed tension, stress, concern, confusion, shame. When the experimental design
was altered to make the learner dimly visible, some subjects sought to avoid the
consequences of their actions by “avert[ing] their eyes from the person they were
shocking, often turning their heads in an awkward and conspicuous manner.”
62
But
the experimenter assured them that he took full responsibility for the consequences
of the subject’s actions. Moreover, the subject was told he or she had “no other choice”;
PSYCHOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES
271
his or her continued participation was “essential.” Despite clear misgivings, as noted
above, the majority of subjects not only administered the “shocks” but stayed the
course to the end.
63
A fair number projected their own stress and shame on to the
learner, blaming him “for having volunteered for the experiment, and more viciously,
for his stupidity and obstinacy.” Interestingly, the obedience displayed by women “was
virtually identical to the performance of men,” though “the level of conflict
experienced by the women was on the whole higher than that felt by our male
[subjects].”
64
Variations on the core experiment helped Milgram to zero in on some of the factors
affecting obedience. Subjects placed in greater physical proximity to the learner,
sometimes even touching him, were less likely to proceed than those more remotely
positioned: “the changing set of spatial relations leads to a potentially shifting set
of alliances over the several experimental conditions.” Christopher Browning noted
PSYCHOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES
272
Figure 10.1 The core of the Milgram experiments: an authority figure (the experimenter, top right) commands a subject to
administer supposed shocks when a learner answers a question incorrectly. The subject is instructed to increase the voltage as
the actor conveys first pain, then ominous silence. How far will an ordinary person turn the dial?
Source: From Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority (New York: Random House, 1995)
that “when not under the direct surveillance of the scientist, many of the subjects
‘cheated’ by giving lower shocks than prescribed.”
65
When an ordinary-seeming
person was substituted for the white-coated experimenter, “only a third as many
[subjects] followed the common man as followed the experimenter.” Furthermore,
when other “subjects” were added and secretly instructed to rebel against the authority
figure, “the effects of [such] peer rebellion [were] very impressive in undercutting
the experimenter’s authority.” This led Milgram to conclude that “the mutual support
provided by men for each other is the strongest bulwark we have against the excesses
of authority.” In a point relevant to our discussion of gender and genocide (Chapter
13), Milgram noted that selecting an adult male for the “learner” role probably
affected the outcome. “As victims, [women] would most likely generate more dis-
obedience, for cultural norms militate against hurting women even more strongly
than hurting men....Similarly, if a child were placed in the victim’s role,
disobedience would be much greater.”
66
Milgram summarized his results, which have been confirmed by dozens of
subsequent studies:
67
What is surprising is how far ordinary individuals will go in complying with
the experimenter’s instructions. . . . It is the extreme willingness of adults to go
to almost any lengths on the command of an authority that constitutes the chief
finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation....
Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on
their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even
when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked
to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality,
relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.
68
Milgram emphasized that “every sign of tension” among the subjects was “evidence
of the failure of authority to transform the [subject] to an unalloyed state of agency.”
69
There was at least a latent capacity and desire to resist. In this context, it is worth
examining the comportment of the minority of subjects who refused to “shock” the
learner. One was a professor of Old Testament studies, who may have drawn on his
religious convictions to resist:
EXPERIMENTER: It’s absolutely essential to the experiment that we continue.
SUBJECT: I understand that statement, but I don’t understand why the
experiment is placed above this person’s life.
EXPERIMENTER: There is no permanent tissue damage.
SUBJECT: Well, that’s your opinion. If he [the learner] doesn’t want to continue,
I’m taking orders from him.
EXPERIMENTER: You have no other choice sir, you must go on.
SUBJECT: If this were Russia maybe, but not in America.
70
Another subject, an industrial engineer, grew “incredulous and indignant” when
ordered to continue administering the shocks:
PSYCHOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES
273
EXPERIMENTER: You have no other choice.
MR. RENSALEER: I do have a choice....Why don’t I have a choice? I came
here on my own free will. I thought I could help in a research project. But if
I have to hurt somebody to do that, or if I was in his place, too, I wouldn’t stay
there. I can’t continue. I’m very sorry. I think I’ve gone too far already, probably.
71
To anticipate our discussion of the psychology of “rescuers,” below, the resisters
demonstrated a high degree of empathy for the learner – and of ego independence,
symbolized by their refusal to submit blindly to an authority figure.
72
It is intriguing
that one participant in the experiments, a young man named Ron Ridenhour who
“refused to give even the first shock,” went on to serve in the US military in Vietnam;
it was he who “blew the whistle on the massacre at My Lai” (see the epigraph to this
section).
73
But the resisters were, to repeat, a minority. Milgram voiced his expectation
that outside of the laboratory environment – and especially in conditions of all-
consuming dictatorship or totalitarianism – they would be far fewer.
In his account of the experiments, Milgram moved beyond psychology to the
sociology of modernity and bureaucratic complexity, which granted individuals
a large measure of physical and psychological distance from the consequences of
their actions. It is not surprising, therefore, to find the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman
drawing on Milgram’s work to support his contention that “the process of ratio-
nalization facilitates behaviour that is inhuman and cruel.”
74
This theme is explored
further in the discussion in Chapter 11 about sociological perspectives on genocide.
The Zimbardo experiments
Other insights into the psychology of genocide and group violence may be drawn
from a second classic set of experiments, conducted by a Stanford University team
under the social psychologist Philip Zimbardo in 1971. (These inspired the 2001
German film The Experiment.) As Zygmunt Bauman summarizes:
In Zimbardo’s experiment (planned for a fortnight, but stopped after one week
for fear of irreparable damage to the body and mind of the subjects) volunteers had
been divided at random into prisoners and prison guards. Both sides were given
the symbolic trappings of their position. Prisoners, for example, wore tight caps
which simulated shaven heads, and gowns which made them appear ridiculous.
Their guards were put in uniforms and given dark glasses which hid their eyes from
being looked into by the prisoners. No side was allowed to address the other by
name; strict impersonality was the rule. There was [a] long list of petty regulations
invariably humiliating for the prisoners and stripping them of human dignity. This
was the starting point. What followed surpassed and left far behind the designers’
ingenuity. The initiative of the guards (randomly selected males of college age,
carefully screened against any sign of abnormality) knew no bounds....The
construed superiority of the guards rebounded in the submissiveness of the
prisoners, which in its turn tempted the guards into further displays of their
powers, which were then duly reflected in more self-humiliation on the part of
PSYCHOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES
274
the prisoners. . . . The guards forced the prisoners to chant filthy songs, to defecate
in buckets which they did not allow them to empty, to clean toilets with bare
hands; the more they did it, the more they acted as if they were convinced of the
non-human nature of the prisoners, and the less they felt constrained in inventing
and administering measures of an ever-more appalling degree of inhumanity.
75
This slightly overstates the case. In fact, the guards divided into three factions, with
about one-third assuming “cruel, callous, sadistic, dominating, authoritarian, tyran-
nical, coercive, and aggressive roles.” James Waller describes a middle group as “tough
but fair,” while a final segment “emerged as ‘good guards’ and tried to help the
prisoners when they could.”
76
Christopher Browning points out that the behavior
of Zimbardo’s guards was strikingly similar to that of the “ordinary men” he studied
for his eponymous book – from the “nucleus of increasingly enthusiastic killers who
volunteered,” through those who “performed . . . when assigned but who did not seek
opportunities to kill,” through “a small group (less than 20 percent) of refusers and
evaders.”
77
However, it must be remembered that Zimbardo’s experiment was
terminated after only a few days; it is impossible to say how many of the “tough but
fair” group and the hold-outs would eventually have behaved sadistically, had it
continued.
To the public, Zimbardo’s results were as shocking as Milgram’s. They depicted
“the sudden transmogrification of likeable and decent American boys into near
monsters of the kind allegedly to be found only in places like Auschwitz or
Treblinka.”
78
Contemporary readers are likely to think of the American men and
women who inflicted sadistic and humiliating abuses on inmates at Abu Ghraib
prison near Baghdad, along with many other sites in occupied Iraq and at the
US-run prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
79
Indeed, in the wake of the Abu Ghraib
revelations, many commentators cited the Zimbardo experiments as evidence that (in
the words of criminologist David Wilson) “If you give a person power over someone
who is powerless, someone who has been demonised or made to seem less human,
then that absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
80
■
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RESCUERS
Just when immersion in the genocidal actions of “ordinary” men and women leaves
you wallowing in pessimism, the rescuers come again to the rescue. The historical
record is replete with accounts of brutal perpetrators, and bystanders whose
“neutrality...helps the stronger party in an unequal struggle.”
81
But it is also filled
with testimonials to the brave souls who interceded to save total strangers (as well as
friends and acquaintances) from genocide.
The most famous of these figures are associated with the Jewish Holocaust, in
part because that campaign of mass murder is better known than all the rest put
together. Many readers will be familiar with the extraordinary collective opposition
mounted by the people of Nazi-occupied Denmark, which, it should be conceded,
had been “awarded a degree of autonomy that was unusual for a region under German
occupation.” In 1943, Nazi officials encountered “a local population unanimous in
PSYCHOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES
275
its resolve” to preserve Danish Jews from round-up and extermination. Virtually the
entire Jewish population, several thousand strong, was successfully transferred by the
operators of small boats to safety in neutral Sweden. According to Raul Hilberg, “help
came from every quarter. The Danish police shielded the operators by warning them
of danger, individuals helped to sell Jewish belongings, taxi drivers transported the
Jews to the ports, house and apartment owners offered the victims shelter, Pastor
Krohn [an advocate for the Jews] handed out blank baptismal certificates, druggists
supplied free stimulants to keep people awake, and so on.” It was, writes Hilberg, “one
of the most remarkable rescue operations in history.”
82
Among individual rescuers of Jews, at least before the release of Steven Spielberg’s
film Schindler’s List – about the exploits of a German industrialist who saved hundreds
of Jews from the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau – the most renowned was
probably a Swedish representative in Budapest, Raoul Wallenberg:
In 1944 the United States belatedly established the War Refugee Board (WRB)
to aid and rescue the victims of Nazism. Fearing the imminent deportation of
Hungarian Jewry, the WRB solicited the help of a number of neutral countries
to protect this endangered community. Sweden embraced the American proposal
and appointed Wallenberg as a special envoy to Hungary whose sole mission was
to avert the deportation of Jews. Taking advantage of his diplomatic immunity and
money contributed by private organizations like the American Jewish Joint
Distribution Committee, Wallenberg issued bogus Swedish “protective passports,”
rented apartment buildings to serve as Jewish sanctuaries under Swedish
protection, and personally whisked hundreds of Hungarian Jews off German
transports on the pretext that they were wards of Sweden. Wallenberg’s example
inspired other neutral embassies and the International Red Cross office in
Budapest to protect Jews too. According to some estimates, the rescue campaign
launched by Wallenberg may have saved as many as 100,000 Jews.
83
Wallenberg’s story has overshadowed those who facilitated his rescue, such as the
Swedish diplomat Per Anger. According to historian Henry Huttenbach, it was Anger
who first “hit on the idea of issuing Jews temporary Swedish passports and identity
cards....Anger’s undivided cooperation allowed Wallenberg to succeed....It is safe
to say that Wallenberg’s mission to save Hungarian Jews from deportation would not
have got off the ground had Wallenberg not had the total support from the Swedish
Embassy, that is, from Per Anger.”
84
In the grimmest of ironies, Wallenberg the rescuer survived the Nazis, only to
disappear into the custody of Soviet forces occupying Hungary. For reasons unknown,
he appears to have spent years in detention before finally dying in the camps sometime
in the 1950s.
85
An equally striking rescuer was Chiune Sugihara, the Japanese consul in Lithuania,
who received a flood of Jews fleeing the Nazi-Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939.
Sugihara:
willingly issued them transit visas by considerably stretching his own government’s
official rules, allowing the Polish Jews to cross Soviet territory en route to Japan
PSYCHOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES
276
Figure 10.2 Per Anger, the Swedish diplomat who worked
with Raoul Wallenberg to save 100,000 Hungarian Jews
from the Nazis, poses with a portrait of Wallenberg in 1985.
Wallenberg probably died in a Soviet camp after the Second
World War; Anger died in 2001.
Source: US Holocaust Memorial Museum/Courtesy Per and
Ellena Anger.
Figure 10.3 Wallenberg and Anger issued letters of
protection (Schutz-pass), similar to this one for Lili Katz,
through the Swedish legation in Budapest. The documents
had no legal force, but, combined with a healthy measure of
bluff, they saved tens of thousands of lives. In the bottom
left of the pass is the letter “W,” standing for Wallenberg.
Budapest, 1944.
Source: US Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of
Lena Kurtz Deutsch.
and, from there, to anywhere they wished. Before the Japanese government
reassigned him, Sugihara issued some 4,500 visas, many of them handwritten, and
he did not stop issuing visas until literally the moment before his train carried
him out....His visas were also easy to counterfeit. Combined with those
forgeries, Sugihara’s efforts may well have saved some 10,000 Jews.
86
Famous rescuers such as these took advantage of their professional positions to
undertake their missions; but, of course, millions of people in the twentieth century
alone utilized their occupational and bureaucratic positions to kill rather than save.
What distinguishes individuals who choose to shelter and assist those at mortal risk
of genocide, often at mortal risk to themselves?
In many cases, religious motivations have played an important role. At its best
and most humane, religion embodies universal values of compassion and mercy (for
more on this, see Chapter 16). And so we find the Catholic cleric Dompropst Bernard
Lichtenberg of Berlin, rejecting the passivity and anti-semitism of the church
hierarchy, and daring “to pray publicly for all Jews, baptized [as Christians] or not.”
When his efforts failed to save Jews from transportation to the death camps, he
“demanded that he be allowed to join [them] on their journey to the East.” He was
imprisoned, and picked up by the Gestapo upon his release; he died en route to
Dachau.
87
Less demonstrative but no less religiously imbued were the actions of the
“kind and gentle” Muslim notable recalled by a survivor of the Armenian holocaust,
who took refuge in his home:
The bey followed Islamic law to the letter and was a devout believer. He prayed
five times a day and fasted one month out of the year. I used to join him in these
[observances]. He had also made a pilgrimage to Mecca and was thus called “Haji.”
He was a principled and just man. He felt genuine sorrow for the Armenian
massacre and considered it a sin to bring any confiscated Armenian possessions
into his home. He used to condemn the Turkish government, saying, “The
Armenians are a hardy, intelligent, and industrious people. If there are any guilty
among them, the government can arrest and punish them instead of slaughtering
a helpless and innocent people.”
88
However, it is also the case that “more intense religiosity is frequently associated
with greater prejudice”;
89
and in any case, religious belief is by no means necessary
to rescuers tout court. Often it matters only that one be “so overcome by the human
tragedy of the genocide” that she or he feels impelled to intercede. During the Rwanda
catastrophe of 1994, Paul Rusesabagina, Hutu proprietor of the Hotel Mille Collines
in Kigali, saved nearly 1,300 refugees – mostly Tutsi, as was his wife – from slaughter
at the hands of rampaging Hutu militia, preserving them for the full two-and-a-half
months of the genocide. (The 2004 film of his exploits, Hotel Rwanda, brought
international attention to this rescuer.) Rusesabagina “rationed water from the
swimming pool, had checkpoints removed, bribed killers with money and Scotch
whisky and kept a secret telephone line open to the outside world.” “I wanted to
keep my people, the refugees, safe,” he told a suddenly interested world. “That was
my main objective and I tried to keep that up to the end...I rather take myself as
PSYCHOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES
278
someone who did his duties and responsibilities, someone who remained until the
end when others changed completely their professions, and most of them became
killers and others were killed.”
90
With the guidance of Samuel and Pearl Oliner, let us dig a little deeper into the
psychology of rescuers. In 1988 the Oliners published a volume on “Rescuers of Jews
in Nazi Europe,” based on hundreds of interviews with those identified as such by
the staff of the Yad Vashem museum. The Altruistic Personality has since become a
classic, not only of Jewish Holocaust literature but of the social sciences.
What did the Oliners and their researchers discover about the motivations of those
who aided, sheltered, and protected defenseless Jews, when most around them were
turning their backs or actively assisting with the slaughter? Consider some of the
testimonies of these otherwise ordinary individuals:
I had contact all the time with people who were against Hitler. They told me the
most horrible things – transports, gas chambers, drownings, gassing in trains –
I knew that a huge injustice was taking place. I felt tense, I couldn’t sleep.
I could smell the smoke from Majdanek [death camp] . . .
He had nobody else to help him. [The Jews] could not survive on their rations.
. . . When [the Germans] started taking the Jewish people, that really lit my fire.
They took them like sheep, throwing them into trains. I couldn’t stand it anymore.
. . . They took innocent people and I wanted to help.
Somebody had to do it.
...Unless we helped, they would be killed. I could not stand that thought.
I never would have forgiven myself.
Can you see it? Two young girls come, one sixteen or seventeen, and they tell you
a story that their parents were killed and they were pulled in and raped. What are
you supposed to tell them – “Sorry, we are full already?”
. . . I was so ashamed of what other so-called Christians did that I felt I wanted
to do the contrary.
If you can save somebody’s life, that’s your duty.
We helped people who were in need. Who they were was absolutely immaterial
to us. It wasn’t that we were especially fond of Jewish people. We felt we wanted
to help everybody who was in trouble.
91
The personal values and psychological orientations cited again and again by
the Oliners revolve around these core themes: altruism (from the Latin: literally,
“otherism”), universalism, care (“the obligation to help the needy”), compassion
PSYCHOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES
279
(literally, “together feeling”), empathy, equity/egalitarianism, justice (defined as “the
right of innocent people to be free from persecution”), respect, fairness, and patriotism
(understood as “encompass[ing] national acceptance of pluralistic and diverse groups
in relationships of equality rather than mere tolerance”).
92
It is clear from the Oliners’
account that these orientations have an abiding basis in the family upbringings of
the rescuers. Rescuers were significantly more likely than non-rescuers to describe
their parents as benevolent, loving, kind, tolerant, compassionate, non-abusive, prone
to explain rather than punish, extensive rather than restrictive in their orientation
towards others. The result, more commonly among rescuers than among bystanders,
was an “ego orientation” that emphasized not only these traits, but a basic strength,
autonomy, independence. As the authors eloquently put it:
Already attuned to conferring meaning on events through their particular moral
sensibilities, [rescuers] depended on familiar patterns to discern the significance
of the unprecedented events at hand. To a large extent, then, helping Jews was
less a decision made at a critical juncture than a choice prefigured by an established
character and way of life. As Iris Murdoch observes, the moral life is not something
that is switched on at a particular crisis but is rather something that goes on
continually in the small piecemeal habits of living. Hence, “at crucial moments
of choice most of the business of choosing is already over.” Many rescuers
themselves reflected this view, saying that they “had no choice” and that their
behavior deserved no special attention, for it was simply an “ordinary” thing
to do.
93
Even with these strong familial buttresses, the psychology of the rescuer did not
necessarily arise “out of the blue” or in purely disinterested fashion. Geographical
proximity, particularly in urban settings, facilitated matters. Nationalist sentiment
was not absent: French rescuers were more likely to help Jews who were French
citizens than stateless refugees. Frequently, rescuers had had previous positive
relationships with Jews: as childhood friends, co-workers, neighbors. Sometimes
Christian rescuers had a perception of Jews as a “chosen people,” intimately related
through the shared religious tradition. “Several rescuers acknowledged that they
became dependent on the Jews they helped,” for household chores, assistance with
repairs and maintenance, and so on.
94
In some cases, rescuers had little idea what
they were getting themselves into; small and low-risk acts of kindness would lead
inexorably to dramatic acts of long-term and high-risk helping. Sometimes the
rescued promised the rescuer a material reward after the war was over. More attractive
and more traditionally “innocent” Jews (particularly children) were especially likely
to receive aid. Sometimes sexually intimate relationships developed, as they frequently
do in situations of stress and shared danger.
At times, rescuers felt disappointed or disillusioned by the response of the rescued
after the danger was over. This serves as a reminder that rescuer psychology is not to
be romanticized. I do believe, however, that it is to be idealized, in the profoundest
sense of the word. These people, who usually considered themselves to be utterly
ordinary, point us to the human motivations that may one day bring an end to
genocide in our world. Let us hope they are indeed ordinary – or at least more
PSYCHOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES
280
common than is commonly realized. Because “if humankind is dependent on only
a few autonomously principled people, then the future is bleak indeed.”
95
■
FURTHER STUDY
Roy F. Baumeister, Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty. New York: W.H.
Freeman, 1999. Involving inquiry into the nature of evil.
Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final
Solution in Poland. New York: HarperPerennial, 1998. How a group of middle-
aged German reservists was conscripted into genocidal killing.
Thomas Kenneally, Schindler’s List. New York: Touchstone, 1993. Fact-based novel
about the famous rescuer of Jews; basis for the film.
Neil J. Kressel, Mass Hate: The Global Rise of Genocide and Terror. New York: Plenum
Press, 1996. Focuses on the psychology of genocidal perpetrators; usefully read
alongside Waller (see below).
Robert J. Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide.
New York: Basic Books, 1986. Analyzes the complex psychology of medical
workers/murderers at Auschwitz.
Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View. New York:
HarperPerennial, 1995. “The Milgram Experiments”: a classic of social-scientific
investigation.
Leonard S. Newman and Ralph Erber, eds, Understanding Genocide: The Social
Psychology of the Holocaust. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Essays on
perpetrators and bystanders in the Jewish and other genocides.
Samuel P. Oliner and Pearl M. Oliner, The Altruistic Personality: Rescuers of Jews in
Nazi Europe. New York: The Free Press, 1988. Intensely moving large-sample
study.
Irene Gut Opdyke with Jennifer Armstrong, In My Hands: Memories of a Holocaust
Rescuer. New York: Anchor Books, 2001. Brief, potent memoir.
Ervin Staub, The Roots of Evil: The Origins of Genocide and Other Group Violence.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Early study of the psychology of
genocide.
Samuel Vaknin, Malignant Self-love: Narcissism Revisited (5th rev. edn). Skopje:
Narcissus Publications, 2003. Lengthy work by an authority on narcissism.
James Waller, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass
Killing. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Social-psychological account,
readable and up-to-date.
Emmy E. Werner, A Conspiracy of Decency: The Rescue of the Danish Jews. Boulder,
CO: Westview Press, 2002. The story of the famous rescue operation during the
Second World War.
PSYCHOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES
281
■
NOTES
1 James Waller, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); see in particular ch. 3, “The ‘Mad Nazi’:
Psychopathology, Personality, and Extraordinary Evil,” pp. 55–93.
2 Greek Mythology Link, “Narcissus,” http://homepage.mac.com/cparada/GML/
Narcissus.html.
3 Anton Blok, “The Narcissism of Minor Differences,” ch. 7 in Blok, Honour and Violence
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), p. 115.
4 Freud quoted in Blok, Honour and Violence, p. 117.
5 See Samuel Vaknin, Malignant Self-love: Narcissism Revisited (Skopje: Narcissus
Publications, 2003).
6 “A narcissist openly reveals his megalomania, but craves admiration, praise, and flattery.
He has little sense of humor, he cannot form significant relationships, and blows to his
self-esteem can elicit violent anger. He has a paranoid distrust of others. He can appear
self-confident and secure, but deep down feels shame, insecurity, and inferiority....
He may, at one moment, appear a charming, benign benefactor, and the next moment
turn into a raging, aggressive attacker. . . . He has a distorted conscience. Depression is
common.” Neil J. Kressel, Mass Hate: The Global Rise of Genocide and Terror (New York:
Plenum Press, 1996), p. 133.
7 Quoted in Barbara Ehrenreich, Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War
(New York: Metropolitan Books, 1997), p. 210.
8 Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (London: Phoenix, 2004),
p. 617.
9 Vaknin, “Collective Narcissism,” http://samvak.tripod.com/14.html; emphasis added,
to stress that the “collective” character of such narcissism need not require unanimity
or even a majority among the afflicted group. Precisely when ordinary grandiosity
becomes pathological narcissism is difficult to discern, but as an American correspondent,
Kathleen Morrow, points out, it seems to be tied to systemic factors. “An assumption of
superiority is part of every national character. . . . If you listen long enough to any citizen
of any nation, you will detect a trace of narcissistic unreality...part of the cultural
mythology that holds the group together. (The French think they invented ‘culture,’ the
Italians are sure they are the only people who really know how to ‘enjoy life,’ etc.) I tend
to assume this almost universal tendency to national grandiosity is innocent enough – as
long as the nation or group does not accumulate enough power to begin to try to impose
its internal mythology on the rest of the world....I suppose I’m arguing that US
collective pathological narcissism is not a cultural or psychological problem as much as a
systemic one. By systemic, I mean the global system, which at this point exhibits a
number of power vacuums into which a too-powerful US can narcissistically rush.”
Morrow, personal communication, May 5, 2005.
10 For a pointed analysis of the collective narcissism of my other country of citizenship, see
Clifford Krauss, “Was Canada Just Too Good to be True?,” New York Times, May 25,
2005.
11 Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge (see Chapter 7) is another candidate, but I consider
Khmer Rouge fanaticism to have been too shallowly rooted in society as a whole to merit
inclusion.
12 Robert Jay Lifton, Superpower Syndrome: America’s Apocalyptic Confrontation with the
World (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press/Nation Books, 2003), p. 190.
13 For the full text, see “The National Security Strategy of the United States of America,”
http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss.html.
14 See Walter Pincus, “Pentagon Revises Nuclear Strike Plan: Strategy Includes Preemptive
Use Against Banned Weapons,” Washington Post, September 11, 2005, http://www.
washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/10/AR2005091001053.html.
PSYCHOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES
282
15 Quoted in Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, Volume 1: The Years of
Persecution, 1933–1939 (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), p. 259.
16 Alexander Donat, The Holocaust Kingdom (Washington, DC: Holocaust Library, 1999),
p. 197.
17 Michael Burleigh, Ethics and Extermination: Reflections on Nazi Genocide (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 191.
18 Patricia Marchak, Reigns of Terror (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003),
p. 21.
19 Heizer quoted in Levon Marashlian, “Finishing the Genocide: Cleansing Turkey of
Armenian Survivors, 1920–1923,” in Richard G. Hovannisian, ed., Remembrance and
Denial: The Case of the Armenian Genocide (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999),
p. 115. (Heizer’s statement dates from July 1915.) The US consul in Mamouret-ul-Aziz,
Leslie A. Davis, similarly reported that “The scenes of that week [of deportation] were
heartrending. The [Armenian] people were preparing to leave their homes and to
abandon their houses, their lands, their property of all kinds. They were selling their
possessions for whatever they could get. The streets were full of Turkish women, as well
as men, who were seeking bargains on this occasion, buying organs, sewing machines,
furniture, rugs, and other articles of values for almost nothing....The scene reminded
me of vultures swooping down on their prey. It was a veritable Turkish holiday and all
the Turks went out in their gala attire to feast and to make merry over the misfortunes
of others.” Davis quoted in Marchak, Reigns of Terror, p. 166.
20 Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, p. 265.
21 Gérard Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1997), p. 142.
22 Quoted in Jean Hatzfeld (trans. Linda Coverdale), Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda
Speak (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2005), p. 87.
23 H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1954), p. 180.
24 Burleigh, Ethics and Extermination, p. 164.
25 Montefiore, Stalin, p. 626.
26 “Everybody could hope for speedy advancement because every day somebody was
plucked from their midst and had to be replaced. Of course, everybody was also a
candidate for prison and death, but during the day they did not think about it, giving full
rein to their fears only at night.” Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope (New York:
Modern Library, 1999), p. 282.
27 Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis, pp. 231–32.
28 Burke quoted in Linda Green, “Fear as a Way of Life,” in Alexander Laban Hinton, ed.,
Genocide: An Anthropological Reader (Malden, MA: Blackwell), p. 307.
29 See J.S. Piven, Death and Delusion: A Freudian Analysis of Mortal Terror (Greenwich, CT:
IAP Publishers, 2004).
30 Charny quoted in Leo Kuper, The Prevention of Genocide (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1985), p. 196. In The Denial of Death, for me one of the twentieth
century’s most profound books, Ernest Becker traces both human pathologies and human
civilization to the terror of death: “The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human
animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity – activity designed largely
to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final
destiny for man.” Becker, The Denial of Death (New York: The Free Press, 1973), p. ix.
See also the discussion of psychological research on “mortality salience” and “terror
management” in Kate Douglas, “Death Defying,” New Scientist, August 28, 2004.
31 Ehrenreich, Blood Rites, p. 76.
32 On the psychology of “in-group–out-group differentiation,” see Staub, The Roots of Evil,
pp. 58–62.
33 Waller, Becoming Evil, p. 149.
34 Donald L. Horowitz, The Deadly Ethnic Riot (Berkeley, CA: University of California
Press, 2001), p. 548.
PSYCHOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES
283
35 Horowitz, The Deadly Ethnic Riot, p. 548.
36 René Lemarchand, “Disconnecting the Threads: Rwanda and the Holocaust
Reconsidered,” Journal of Genocide Research, 4: 4 (2002), p. 507.
37 Lemarchand, “Disconnecting the Threads,” p. 513. A similar dynamic was evident in the
Nazi SS, where not only was disobedience standardly punished by execution, but the loss
of employment in the camps could mean a transfer to the mortal danger of the eastern
front. Hence, according to Christopher Fettweis, “cowardice played an important role”
in motivating SS members. “These men and women were well aware that to request a
transfer might mean a trip to the Russian front, from which few people returned. The
Jew-killing duties, while perhaps unpleasant, were relatively safe and provided a solid
chance to survive the war. The Russian front must have provided quite an effective
incentive to perform for those assigned to guard the trains, or to man the towers, or to
work in the rear in the Einsatzgruppen.” Fettweis, “War as Catalyst: Moving World War
II to the Center of Holocaust Scholarship,” Journal of Genocide Research, 5: 2 (2003),
p. 229.
38 Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (3rd edn), Vol. 3 (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 1093. Mark Levene also points disparagingly to the
fantastic “notion that worldwide Jewry, despite its dispersal, minority status and history
of persecution, was actually spearheading an international, even cosmic conspiracy to
emasculate and ultimately wipe out not only the German people but all western
civilization.” Levene, “Why Is the Twentieth Century the Century of Genocide?,” Journal
of World History, 11: 2 (2000), p. 323.
39 Omer Bartov, Hitler’s Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 126. Such propaganda had a duly fear-evoking effect
on German fighting forces, who came to view their mission of occupation and genocide
as a fundamentally defensive one, especially with regard to the Slavic enemy. One soldier
wrote in August 1941: “Precisely now one recognizes perfectly what would have
happened to our wives and children had these Russian hordes...succeeded in
penetrating into our Fatherland. I have had the opportunity here to...observe these
uncultivated, multi-raced men. Thank God they have been thwarted from plundering
and pillaging our homeland.” Cited in Bartov, Hitler’s Army, p. 156.
40 A Hutu killer in the Rwandan genocide also recalled: “The perpetrators felt more
comfortable insulting and hitting crawlers in rags rather than properly upright people.
Because they seemed less like us in that position.” Quoted in Hatzfeld, Machete Season,
p. 132.
41 Wolfgang Sofsky, The Order of Terror: The Concentration Camp (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 267.
42 Horowitz, The Deadly Ethnic Riot, p. 393.
43 According to Terrence Des Pres, immersion in filth and excreta has much the same
character, violating psychological taboos so deeply held that they are almost instinctive.
“The shock of physical defilement causes spiritual concussion, and, simply to judge from
the reports of those who have suffered it, subjection to filth seems often to cause greater
anguish than hunger or fear of death. ‘This aspect of our camp life,’ says one survivor [of
the Nazi camps, Reska Weiss], ‘was the most dreadful and the most horrible ordeal to
which we were subjected.’ Another survivor [Leon Szalet] describes the plight of men
forced to lie in their own excreta: they ‘moaned and wept with discomfort and disgust.
Their moral wretchedness was crushing.’” Des Pres, The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in
the Death Camps (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 66.
44 Evelin Lindner, “Gendercide and Humiliation in Honour and Human-rights Societies,”
in Adam Jones, ed., Gendercide and Genocide (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University
Press, 2004), p. 40.
45 Retzinger and Scheff cited in Lindner, “Gendercide and Humiliation,” p. 45.
46 Lifton, Superpower Syndrome, p. 103.
47 James Gilligan, “Shame, Guilt, and Violence,” Social Research, 70: 4 (winter 2003),
p. 1154.
PSYCHOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES
284
48 Donald Horowitz likewise writes of “deadly ethnic riots” that “the reversal of invidious
comparisons, the retrieval of imperiled respect, and the redistribution of honor are among
the central purposive ideas embedded in the dramaturgy.” Horowitz, The Deadly Ethnic
Riot, p. 431.
49 Taner Akçam is strong on this: “Turkish nationalism arose as a reaction to the experience
of constant humiliations. Turkish national sentiment constantly suffered from the effects
of an inferiority complex....Critical...was the fact that the Turks not only were
continuously humiliated and loathed, but they were conscious of this humiliation....A
nation that was humiliated in this way in the past and is also conscious of that experience,
will try to prove its own greatness and importance.” Akçam, “The Genocide of the
Armenians and the Silence of the Turks,” in Levon Chorbajian and George Shirinian,
eds, Studies in Comparative Genocide (London: Macmillan, 1999), p. 129. See also
Akçam, From Empire to Republic: Turkish Nationalism and the Armenian Genocide
(London: Zed Books, 2004), chs 2–3.
50 “Nazi doctors told me of indelible scenes, which they either witnessed as young children
or were told about by their fathers, of German soldiers returning home defeated after
World War I. These beaten men, many of them wounded, engendered feelings of pathos,
loss, and embarrassment, all amidst national misery and threatened revolution. Such
scenes, associated with strong feelings of humiliation, were seized upon by the Nazis to
the point where one could say that Hitler rose to power on the promise of avenging
them.” Lifton, Superpower Syndrome, p. 111.
51 I have explored the link between “Humiliation and Masculine Crisis in Iraq,” focusing
on the invasion of 2003 and subsequent occupation and uprising, in an article of this
name in Al-Raida (Beirut: Institute for Women’s Studies in the Arab World), Vol. 21,
July 2004. Available at http://adamjones.freeservers.com/iraq_crisis.htm.
52 See Jacques Semelin, “Toward a Vocabulary of Massacre and Genocide,” Journal of
Genocide Research, 5: 2 (2003), p. 207.
53 Quoted in Gilligan, “Shame, Guilt and Violence,” p. 1162. Jessica Stern’s interviews with
Palestinian suicide bombers provide further evidence of humiliation as a motivating force.
See Stern, Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill (New York: Ecco Press,
2003).
54 This is also evident, with generally more positive outcomes, in the history of movements
for national autonomy or independence. Clearly, the educated and otherwise privileged
are disproportionately represented among the leaderships of such movements.
55 James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 1990), p. 37.
56 Waller, Becoming Evil, p. 68.
57 Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution
in Poland (New York: Perennial, 1993), p. 184.
58 See Thomas Blass, The Man Who Shocked the World: The Life and Legacy of Stanley
Milgram (New York: Basic Books, 2004).
59 Waller, Becoming Evil, pp. 103–4.
60 Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (New York:
HarperPerennial, 1995), p. 33; emphasis added.
61 Milgram, Obedience to Authority, p. 40.
62 Milgram, Obedience to Authority, p. 34. “Subjects seemed able to resist the experimenter
far better when they did not have to confront [the ‘victim’] face to face” (p. 62).
63 One might expect a degree of trauma to have resulted to the subjects from learning their
capacity to do harm, but according to Milgram, this was not the case. Nearly all subjects
expressed gratitude for the insights that the experiments had provided them. The
comment of one subject in a follow-up interview was: “I think people should think more
deeply about themselves and their relation to their world and to other people.” Milgram,
Obedience to Authority, p. 196.
64 Milgram, Obedience to Authority, pp. 63, 161.
65 Browning, Ordinary Men, p. 172.
PSYCHOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES
285
66 Milgram, Obedience to Authority, pp. 40, 62–63, 97, 118, 121.
67 See Waller, Becoming Evil, p. 106. For a recent evaluation of Milgram’s work, see Thomas
Blass, “Perpetrator Behavior as Destructive Obedience: An Evaluation of Stanley
Milgram’s Perspective, the Most Influential Social-psychological Approach to the
Holocaust,” ch. 4 in Leonard S. Newman and Ralph Erber, eds, Understanding Genocide:
The Social Psychology of the Holocaust (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002),
pp. 91–109.
68 Milgram, Obedience to Authority, pp. 5–6.
69 Milgram, Obedience to Authority, p. 155.
70 Milgram, Obedience to Authority, p. 48.
71 Milgram, Obedience to Authority, p. 51.
72 However, as Roy Baumeister notes, while “empathy may prevent cruelty in some cases
. . . it can also serve it. The true sadist is not lacking in empathy – on the contrary,
empathy helps the sadist to derive maximum pleasure and inflict the greatest pain.”
Baumeister, Evil, p. 247. For more on the psychology of torture and sadism, see Elaine
Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1985), esp. ch. 1; and John Conroy, Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People:
The Dynamics of Torture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000).
73 Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 1999), p. 333. On Ridenhour’s whistle-blowing, see Michael
Bilton and Kevin Sim, Four Hours in My Lai (New York: Penguin, 1993), pp. 214–20.
74 Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
2000), p. 155.
75 Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, pp. 166–67.
76 Waller, Becoming Evil, pp. 222–23. Zimbardo’s core results were published in two
articles: Philip G. Zimbardo, “Pathology of Imprisonment,” Society, 6 (1972), pp. 4–8;
and Craig Haney, Curtis Banks, and Philip G. Zimbardo, “Interpersonal Dynamics in
a Simulated Prison,” International Journal of Criminology and Penology, 1 (1983),
pp. 69–97.
77 Browning, Ordinary Men, p. 168.
78 Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, p. 167.
79 See, e.g., Patrick Jarreau, “America and Its Moral Superiority Complex,” Le Monde, May
7, 2003.
80 Ryan Dilley, “Is It in Anyone to Abuse a Captive?,” BBC News Online, May 5, 2004.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/3683115.stm.
81 Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, Vol. 1, p. 318.
82 Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, Vol. 2, pp. 589, 597–98.
83 Samuel P. Oliner and Pearl M. Oliner, The Altruistic Personality: Rescuers of Jews in Nazi
Europe (New York: The Free Press, 1988), p. 20.
84 Henry R. Huttenbach, “In Memoriam: Per Anger, 1914–2002,” Journal of Genocide
Research, 5: 2 (2003), p. 191.
85 A concise and readable account of Wallenberg’s efforts to save Hungarian Jews and his
subsequent fate is John Bierman, Righteous Gentile: The Story of Raoul Wallenberg, Missing
Hero of the Holocaust (rev. edn.) (London: Penguin, 1995).
86 John G. Heidenrich, How to Prevent Genocide: A Guide for Policymakers, Scholars, and the
Concerned Citizen (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001), p. 122.
87 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: The
Viking Press, 1965), p. 130; emphasis added.
88 Survivor testimony quoted in Donald E. Miller and Lorna Touryan Miller, Survivors: An
Oral History of the Armenian Genocide
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press,
1999), p. 13.
89 Oliner and Oliner, The Altruistic Personality, p. 155. The Oliners consider religious
belief “at best...only weakly related to rescue” of Jews during the Second World War
(p. 156).
90 Mike Collett-White, “‘Rwanda’s Schindler’ Saved 1,268 Lives,” The Scotsman, December
PSYCHOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES
286
30, 2004. See also Jeevan Vasagar, “From Four-star Sanctuary to Star of Hollywood: The
Hotel That Saved Hundreds from Genocide,” Guardian, February 16, 2005,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/rwanda/story/0,14451,1415516,00.html.
91 Oliner and Oliner, The Altruistic Personality, pp. 119, 134, 138, 143, 168–69, 197,
216–18.
92 Oliner and Oliner, The Altruistic Personality, pp. 159, 209.
93 Oliner and Oliner, The Altruistic Personality, p. 222. Such values and character traits may
also be manifested collectively, as with the “conspiracy of decency” among Danes to
preserve the country’s Jewish population.
94 Oliner and Oliner, The Altruistic Personality, p. 86.
95 Oliner and Oliner, The Altruistic Personality, p. 257.
PSYCHOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES
287
The Sociology and
Anthropology of
Genocide
■
INTRODUCTION
The disciplines of sociology and anthropology are distinguished by the kinds of soci-
eties they study. Anthropologists have carried out work on mostly non-industrialized
and “primitive” societies, while sociologists have focused on social patterns and
processes within the industrialized “First World.”
1
Anthropology also possesses a
distinctive methodology: fieldwork. Nonetheless, the disciplines are linked by a
common concern with societal and cultural processes, and it is appropriate to consider
them together.
Sociology and anthropology also shared a reluctance, until relatively recently,
to confront issues of genocide and state terror. “Many sociologists,” stated Irving
Louis Horowitz in the late 1980s, “exhibit a studied embarrassment about these
issues, a feeling that intellectual issues posed in such a manner are melodramatic and
unfit for scientific discourse.”
2
Nancy Scheper-Hughes similarly described “the
traditional role of the anthropologist as neutral, dispassionate, cool and rational, [an]
objective observer of the human condition”; anthropologists traditionally maintained
a “proud, even haughty distance from political engagement.”
3
Fortunately, Horowitz’s evaluation is now obsolete, thanks to a host of sociologists
who – perhaps more than any other group apart from historians – have made seminal
contributions to genocide studies. They include Kurt Jonassohn, Pierre van den
Berghe, Helen Fein, and Zygmunt Bauman. Anthropological inquiries were later
in arriving, but recent years have seen the first anthologies on anthropology and
288
CHAPTER 11
genocide, as well as ground-breaking works by Alexander Laban Hinton, Nancy
Scheper-Hughes, and Christopher Taylor, among others.
4
In examining the contribution of sociological perspectives, this chapter focuses
on three key themes: (1) the sociology of modernity, which has attracted considerable
interest from genocide scholars in the wake of Zygmunt Bauman’s Modernity and the
Holocaust; (2) the sociology of “ethnicity” and ethnic conflict; and (3) the role of
“middleman” or “market-dominant” minorities. It then addresses anthropological
framings of genocide, focusing also on the work of forensic anthropologists.
■
SOCIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES
The sociology of modernity
Is genocide a modern phenomenon?
5
At first glance, the question seems banal. We
have seen (Chapter 1) that the destruction of peoples on the basis of group identity
extends back to mythic prehistory. At the same time, we know that in recent centuries,
and especially during the past hundred years, the prevalence of genocide has taken a
quantitative leap. The central issue is: Has that leap also been qualitative? Is there
something about modernity that has become definitional to genocide?
In one of the most discussed works on the Jewish Holocaust, Modernity and the
Holocaust, sociologist Zygmunt Bauman delivered a resounding “yes” to this question.
“Modern civilization was not the Holocaust’s sufficient condition; it was, however,
most certainly its necessary condition. Without it, the Holocaust would be unthink-
able.”
6
His argument revolved around four core features of modernity: nationalism;
“scientific” racism; technological complexity; and bureaucratic rationalization.
Modern nationalism divided the world “fully and exhaustively...into national
domains,” leaving “no space...for internationalism” and designating “each scrap
of the no-man’s-land . . . [as] a standing invitation to aggression.” In such a world,
European Jews – with their international and cosmopolitan identity – could be
construed as alien. They “defied the very truth on which all nations, old and new alike,
rested their claims; the ascribed character of nationhood, heredity and naturalness
of national entities....The world tightly packed with nations and nation-states
abhorred the non-national void. Jews were in such a void: they were such a void.”
7
This existential unease towards the Jew was combined with scientific racism, which
Bauman depicted as a modern phenomenon,
8
overlaying traditional intercom-
munal antipathies with a veneer of scientific rationality and medical pathology.
This brought with it an impetus to total extermination of the racial Other: “The
only adequate solution to problems posited by the racist world-view is a total and
uncompromising isolation of the pathogenic and infectious race – the source of
disease and contamination – through its complete spatial separation or physical
destruction.”
9
How could such a totalizing project be implemented? For Bauman, the advent of
modern technology and bureaucratic rationality was essential. The mass death that
the Nazis developed and inflicted relied on products of the Industrial Revolution.
Railway transport, gas chambers, Zyklon B cyanide crystals administered by men in
SOCIOLOGY AND ANTHROPOLOGY OF GENOCIDE
289
gas masks – all were essentially modern inventions and had to be managed by a
bureaucracy of death. The great German theorist of modern bureaucracy, Max Weber,
emphasized “its peculiar, ‘impersonal’ character,” which “mean[s] that the mechanism
. . . is easily made to work for anybody who knows how to gain control over it.” Weber
also argued that “the bureaucratization of all [social] domination very strongly
furthers the development of ‘rational matter-of-factness’ and the personality type of
the professional expert,” distinguished by his or her cool amorality and devotion to
efficiency. Moreover, bureaucracy cultivates secrecy: “the concept of the ‘official secret’
is the specific invention of the bureaucracy.”
10
The processing of millions of “subhumans” for anonymous death was unthinkable
in the absence of such a culture, according to Bauman:
By its nature, this is a daunting task, unthinkable unless in conjunction with
the availability of huge resources, means of their mobilization and planned
distribution, skills of splitting the overall task into a great number of partial and
specialized functions and skills to co-ordinate their performance. In short, the
task is inconceivable without modern bureaucracy.
11
Moreover, this “splitting [of ] the overall task” into isolated and fragmented units
of time, space, and work created a vital psychological distance between the victims
and those participating in their annihilation. No individual – except, by reputation,
the distant and semi-mythical Führer figure – exercised overall authority or bore
overall responsibility. One did not commit mass murder per se. Rather, one operated
a railroad switch, or dropped a few cyanide crystals into a shaft: “a cool, objective
operation . . . mechanically mediated...a deed performed at a distance, one whose
effects the perpetrator did not see,” in Wolfgang Sofsky’s words.
12
Much the same
set of values, procedures, and behaviors characterized the nuclear mentality, with its
potential for rationally administered omnicide (Chapter 2).
13
Two main criticisms of this modernity-of-genocide thesis may be advanced. First,
the supposed dividing line between historical and modern genocide may be more
stylistic than substantive. The root-and-branch extermination of entire populations
is entrenched deep in our history as a species. It is simply not the case that “the
Holocaust left behind and put to shame all its alleged pre-modern equivalents,
exposing them as primitive, wasteful and ineffective by comparison,” as Bauman
contended.
14
The second criticism of the modernity-of-genocide thesis may be summarized in
one word: Rwanda (see Chapter 9). There, around one million people were hunted,
corraled, and exterminated in twelve weeks – a rate of killing exceeding by an order
of magnitude that of the “modern” Nazi holocaust. Yet the genocide was carried out
by men and women armed with little more than guns and agricultural implements.
15
It involved no appreciable role for scientific or technical experts. And the killing was
conducted face-to-face, intimately, and publicly, with no resort to the physical and
psychological distancing strategies and official secrecy supposedly necessary for
“modern” mass slaughter.
16
One may argue that the Rwandan holocaust depended
on a complex administrative apparatus; a racist ideology tinged with pseudo-science;
and the industrial mass production of machetes, hoes, firearms, and grenades. But
SOCIOLOGY AND ANTHROPOLOGY OF GENOCIDE
290
bureaucracy is an ancient phenomenon, as successive Chinese dynasties remind us,
and one suspects that the ideology of hate developed by Hutu Power would have been
just as functional without its vaguely modernist overtones.
17
Finally – with regard
to the technology of death – guns, machetes, and explosives all pre-date the Industrial
Revolution.
■
ETHNICITY AND ETHNIC CONFLICT
Loe, this is the payment you shall get, if you be one of them they terme, without.
Thomas Merton, 1637
Few concepts are as amorphous and yet important as ethnicity. On one hand, ethnic
identifications seem so fluid and mutable as to lack almost any “objective” character.
On the other hand, ethnicity is arguably the dominant ideological impetus to conflict
and genocide worldwide.
Three historical phenomena account for the prominence of ethnicity in today’s
“global society.” The first is nationalism, touched on in Chapter 2. As medieval
Europe moved away from a quilt of overlapping sovereignties and towards the for-
mation of modern states, it first fell under the sway of strong, centralizing monarchs.
With the onset of the democratic age via the American and French revolutions,
sovereignty was held increasingly to reside in “the people.” But which people? How
defined? The popular thrust gave rise in the nineteenth century to modern ethnic
nationalism, as Western rulers and their populations sought an ideology that would
unify the new realms. The result was what Benedict Anderson called “imagined
communities”: geographically disparate but mutually identified agglomerations
defining themselves as “French,” “German,” “British,” “Italian,” and so on. The core
idea was that the “imagined community” required a particular political form, the
“nation-state,” to achieve true realization.
On what basis were these communities imagined? It is worth pausing briefly
to consider the bases or foundations of ethnicity, as they have been listed by a
prominent scholar of the subject. Anthony Smith cited six foundations of ethnic
identity: “1. a collective proper name, 2. a myth of common ancestry, 3. shared
historical memories, 4. one or more differentiating elements of common culture,
5. an association with a specific ‘homeland,’ 6. a sense of solidarity for significant
sectors of the population.”
18
While a refined concept of ethnicity is often considered to be a Western invention,
this is open to challenge: the Han Chinese, for example, had a well-developed ethnic
sensibility well before the West’s rise to dominance.
19
Indeed, it could be argued that
the concept is at least “latent” in all societies, independent of Western penetration and
influence. Other social units – notably extended family, clan, and tribe – evince many
of the same solidaristic bonds as ethnicity; they may be considered proto-ethnic
groupings. Like ethnic groups, moreover, these identifications are meaningless
without other collectivities defined against one’s own. There are no in-groups without
out-groups, with what Fredrik Barth has called “boundary maintenance mechanisms”
serving to demarcate the two.
20
SOCIOLOGY AND ANTHROPOLOGY OF GENOCIDE
291
When a dominant ethnic collectivity is established as the basis of a “nation-state,”
a quandary arises in dealing with the out-groups – “ethnic minorities” – that also
find themselves within the boundaries of that state. Such minorities exist everywhere;
even supposedly unified or organic nation-states (Japan is the most commonly cited
example) have them. This often carries explosive consequences for intercommunal
violence, including genocide, as we have had numerous opportunities to witness in
these pages.
The second historical factor is the spread of imperialism and colonialism around
the world (Chapter 2), which shaped the present-day configuration of nation-
alisms in important ways. Most obviously, it spurred the idea of ethnic nationalism
(though some nationalisms, and a wide range of ethnic identifications, clearly existed
independently of it). Despite the best efforts of colonizers to preserve those they
subjugated from such dangerous influences, ethnic-nationalist ideologies were
gradually absorbed and integrated into the anti-colonial movements that arose from
the mid-nineteenth through mid-twentieth centuries. In addition, following the
time-honored strategy of divide and rule, which aimed at preventing nationalism, the
colonialists typically gathered a host of clans, tribes, and long-established “national”
entities into a single territorial and administrative unit. A glance at the ethnic
composition of countries such as Nigeria, Congo, and Indonesia suffices to remind
us of the enormous diversity of peoples that comprised the deliberately unimaginable
“communities” of colonialism.
The nationalist leaders who sprang to prominence in the colonized world in the
1920s and 1930s were thus confronted with the crushing challenge of either forging
a genuine sense of national community among diverse peoples, or negotiating a
peaceful and viable fragmentation of the colonial unit. For the most part, they chose
to maintain the colonial boundaries. In some cases, this produced viable multiethnic
states (Malaysia and Mauritius are often cited), but in many instances it did not.
Sometimes the managed breakup of multiethnic entities led to massive violence
(India, Palestine); in states where the leadership chose to preserve an artificial unity,
time-bombs remained for the future (Nigeria, Indonesia, Yugoslavia). The ethnic
violence associated with the collapse of the Soviet empire in 1991 is a recent example
of this trend.
A final historical conjuncture, often overlooked, is globalization. Although
globalizing trends can be traced back many centuries, they have reached a new stage
of complex interconnectedness at the turn of the millennium. One advantage of
ethnic identifications is that they offer a strong sense of psychological rootedness
amidst change and upheaval. Amidst the rapid transformations associated with
globalization, where is a stable sense of “we,” and therefore of “me,” to be found?
The anthropologist Clifford Geertz has argued that:
during the disorienting process of modernization...unintegrated citizens,
looking for an anchor in a sea of changes, will grab hold of an increasingly anachro-
nistic ethnic identity, which bursts onto the scene and then recedes as the process
of structural differentiation moves toward a reintegrated society.
21
One can question, though, whether such ethnic resurgence is a transitory phe-
nomenon. As globalization proceeds alongside intense ethnic nationalism in many
SOCIOLOGY AND ANTHROPOLOGY OF GENOCIDE
292
parts of the world, it may at least be argued that the “transition” is taking rather longer
than many observers expected. Part of the misunderstanding may lie in the tendency
to believe that ethnic identifications are not primordial but fictional – created and
manipulated by self-interested elites to mobilize their followers. (This line of
argument has been bolstered by recent “postmodern” orientations in the humanities
and social sciences.)
There is an important sense in which ethnic identifications are “imagined” or
“mythical.”
22
As I will show below, they are also subject to endless manipulations by
elite figures and violence specialists. Ethnic identifications are protean in the sense
that all of the six “bases” that Anthony Smith identifies for ethnicity can be altered,
though not always at will or completely. One can change one’s territorial base and
recast one’s primary ethnic identification, as generations of immigrants to the ethnic
“melting-pot” of the United States have done (while often maintaining a secondary
attachment to the previous identification). Ancestral myths can be revised, reinter-
preted, or abandoned. Historical memory, language, culinary taste, forms of artistic
expression – all are highly mutable.
Over time, ethnic identifications often achieve intergenerational stability. They
assume a practical force in individual and group psychology, societal structure,
and political behavior that is impossible to ignore, least of all by those seeking
to understand and confront genocide and other mass violence.
23
In Becoming Evil,
James Waller presents evidence from psychology, sociology, and anthropology to show
that these identifications originate deep in human social behavior: “Knowing who
is kin, knowing who is in our social group, has a deep importance to species like ours.”
Moreover, “We have an evolved capacity to see our group as superior to all others
and even to be reluctant to recognize members of other groups as deserving of equal
respect.” Members of a cannibal tribe in Irian Jaya, Indonesia, convey this pointedly:
they define themselves as “the human beings,” and all others as “the edible ones.”
24
Ethnic conflict and violence “specialists”
Some defining work on the sociology of mass violence has pointed to the role of
individual and organizational actors in provoking and channeling violent outbreaks.
Donald L. Horowitz, for example, stresses the importance of:
organizations, often tied to ethnically based political parties, [that] reflect and
reinforce interethnic hostility through propaganda, ritual, and force. They run
the gamut from civilian to proto-military organizations, operating under varying
degrees of secrecy and with varying degrees of coherence and military training.
Their raison d’être is the alleged danger from the ethnic enemy.
25
For his part, Paul R. Brass emphasizes the role of violence “specialists” operating
within “institutionalized...systems” of violence generation:
The kinds of violence that are committed in ethnic, communal, and racial “riots”
are, I believe, undertaken mostly by “specialists,” who are ready to be called out
SOCIOLOGY AND ANTHROPOLOGY OF GENOCIDE
293
on such occasions, who profit from it, and whose activities profit others who
may or may not be actually paying for the violence carried out. In fact, in many
countries at different times in their histories, there have been regions or cities
and towns which have developed what I call “institutionalized riot systems,”
in which known actors specialize in the conversion of incidents between
members of different communities into ethnic riots. The activities of these
specialists are usually required for a riot to spread from the initial incident of
provocation.
26
The significance of this category of actors to the fomenting and implementing of
genocide should be recognized.
27
Note some of the “specialists” that Brass identifies:
“criminal elements and members of youth gangs,” “local militant group leaders,”
“politicians, businessmen, religious leaders,” “college and university professors,”
“pamphleteers and journalists...deliberately spreading rumors and scurrilous
propaganda,” “hooligans” (ranging from Nazi thugs to modern soccer hoodlums),
“communal political elites.”
28
Add to this list the violence specialists cited by Charles
Tilly in his study of The Politics of Collective Violence: “Pirates, privateers, paramil-
itaries, bandits, mercenaries, mafiosi, militias, posses, guerrilla forces, vigilante
groups, company police, and bodyguards.”
29
Beyond the essential (and universally
acknowledged) role of state officials and security force commanders, what we have
is a veritable who’s-who of the leading agents provocateurs of genocide, its foot-soldiers,
and its ideological defenders.
■
“MIDDLEMAN MINORITIES”
The Greeks and Armenian merchants have been the leeches in this part of the world
sucking the life blood out of the country for centuries.
Admiral Mark L. Bristol, US High Commissioner to Turkey, 1922
Perhaps no collectivities are as vulnerable to hatred and large-scale killing as those
“characterized as possessing an excess of enterprise, ambition, energy, arrogance, and
achievement by those who believe themselves lacking such traits.”
30
Such minorities
are not necessarily immigrants or descendants of immigrants, but often they are, and
this foreignness is a key factor in their targeting. Worldwide, reflecting both centuries-
old patterns and more recent globalizing trends, populations have arrived or been
introduced from outside the established society. Lacking a land-base, as well as the
network of social relations that dominant groups can access, such groups normally
settle in the cities or towns – often in neighborhoods or zones that quickly acquire a
minority tinge. Even when they are brought in by a colonial power as indentured
laborers (as with the Indians whom the British imported to Uganda, South Africa,
Fiji, and elsewhere), there is a strong tendency for such groups to establish themselves
in commercial trades.
Occupying an inherently vulnerable minority position, these sectors have
historically been attractive to colonial powers as local allies. Such alliances allowed
colonial powers to “divide and rule,” with the aid of a minority that was (1) less
SOCIOLOGY AND ANTHROPOLOGY OF GENOCIDE
294
anchored to the territory and dominant culture in question, and therefore less prone
to push for autonomy or national independence; and (2) heavily dependent on
colonial favor, and therefore more likely to be loyal to the colonizers. Colonial favor
often translated into greater educational opportunities and positions in lower and
middle sectors of the bureaucracy. However, even in the absence of such colonial
backing, and in the face of strong opposition from the dominant society, such groups
almost universally emphasize education as a means of moving beyond their marginal
position and attaining prosperity. They typically display strong bonds of ethnic,
cultural, and material solidarity among their members, and they may have the
advantage of access to capital and trading relationships through remaining ties with
their (or their ancestors’) countries of origin.
A frequent result is that these minorities establish a high degree of prominence,
sometimes even outright dominance, in key sectors of the national economy. Well-
known examples include Jews, whom Amy Chua refers to as “the quintessential
market-dominant minority,”
31
and the Chinese of Southeast Asia. East Indians
achieved a similar position in many East African economies, while Lebanese traders
came to dominate the vital diamond trade in West Africa. The Dutch, British, and
Portuguese-descended Whites of Southern Africa may also be cited, along with the
White “pigmentocrats” who enjoy elite status in heavily indigenous countries of Latin
America. The potential for conflict, including for the violent or genocidal targeting
of middleman minorities,
32
is apparent, though far from inevitable.
33
Through their
common and preferential ties to colonial authorities, these minorities were easily
depicted as agents of the alien dominator, opponents of national liberation and self-
determination, and cancers in the body politic. Even today, their frequently extensive
international ties and “cosmopolitan” outlook may grate on the majority’s nationalist
sentiments. Moreover, their previous relationship with a colonial power has often
translated into a quest for alliances with authoritarian regimes in the post-colonial
era. Elite Chinese businessmen in the Philippines and Indonesia, for example, were
among the most enthusiastic and visible backers of the Marcos and Suharto
dictatorships. When authoritarian rule collapsed, the mass hostility, resentment, and
humiliation could be vented under democratic guise – a pattern that Chua has
described well:
In countries with a market-dominant minority and a poor “indigenous” majority,
the forces of democratization and marketization directly collide. As markets
enrich the market-dominant minority, democratization increases the political
voice and power of the frustrated majority. The competition for votes fosters the
emergence of demagogues who scapegoat the resented minority, demanding
an end to humiliation, and insisting that the nation’s wealth be reclaimed by its
“true owners.” Thus as America toasted the spread of global elections through the
1990s, vengeful ethnic slogans proliferated: “Zimbabwe for Zimbabweans,”
“Indonesia for Indonesians,” “Uzbekistan for Uzbeks,” “Kenya for Kenyans,”
“Ethiopia for Ethiopians,” “Yids [Jews] out of Russia,” “Hutu Power,” “Serbia for
Serbs,” and so on. . . . As popular hatred of the rich “outsiders” mounts, the result
is an ethnically charged political pressure cooker in which some form of backlash
is almost unavoidable.
SOCIOLOGY AND ANTHROPOLOGY OF GENOCIDE
295
Among the strategies of backlash, the “most ferocious kind . . . is ethnic cleansing and
other forms of majority-supported ethnic violence,” up to and including genocide.
34
Rwanda in 1994 is the best example of democratization helping to spawn genocide
against a prosperous minority. However, if we remove the democratic element from
the equation, we can also add to the list the two other paradigmatic genocides of the
twentieth century. The relative wealth, industriousness, and educational attainment
of the Armenian minority, even under conditions of discrimination and repression
in the Ottoman lands, made them an easy target for the fanatical nationalism of the
Young Turks (Chapter 4). Similar hatred or at least distaste towards Jews in Germany
and other European countries contributed to popular support for the Holocaust
against them (Chapter 6). Note that all three of these genocides featured massive
looting and plundering along with mass murder (see the discussion of genocide and
greed in Chapter 10). Genocide offers an unprecedented opportunity to “redress”
an economic imbalance by seizing the wealth and property of the victims, and to
inflict on them the kind of humiliation that the dominant population may have
experienced.
■
ANTHROPOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES
I have long been jealous of anthropologists. Political scientists like myself are
commanded to maintain a detached, “objective” view of their subject. Our research
strategems are usually confined to the library and the office, with only occasional
forays into the outside world. Anthropologists, by contrast, are allowed and
encouraged to get their hands dirty. The defining method of anthropology – fieldwork
– commands them to wade into the thick of their subject matter, and get to know
the people they study. They may “emerge from the field exhausted,” but they carry
with them “a material of extraordinary richness and depth.”
35
Reading anthro-
pological case studies, one sees and hears the subjects, smells the air, even tastes the
local food.
Anthropology “calls for an understanding of different societies as they appear from
the inside,”
36
where anthropologists are seen as inevitable and integral participants
in the cross-cultural encounter. They are expected to describe the impact of the
experience on their own subjectivity. Assisting with the forensic excavation of mass
graves in Guatemala, Victoria Sanford reported: “I’m not vomiting, I haven’t fainted,
what a beautiful valley, everything is greener than green, those are real bones, my
god 200 people were massacred here, their relatives are watching.”
37
It would be hard
to describe such an experience as enjoyable. But it is certainly revelatory, both to
author and reader, in a way that more detached analyses rarely are.
Anthropologists have produced some of the most profound and insightful treatises
on genocide and genocidal societies. This is, however, a fairly recent development.
As Alexander Laban Hinton writes in his edited volume, Annihilating Difference:
The Anthropology of Genocide, the “shift in focus” derives from “a theoretical and
ethnographic move away from studying small, relatively stable communities toward
looking at those under siege, in flux, and victimized by state violence or insurgency
movements.”
38
It also reflects a recognition that anthropology was compromised, in
SOCIOLOGY AND ANTHROPOLOGY OF GENOCIDE
296
the past, by its alliance with European imperialism.
39
Most nineteenth-century
anthropologists took for granted European dominance over subject peoples. Their
schema of classification tended to revolve around hierarchies of humanity: they sifted
and categorized the peoples of the world in a way that bolstered the European claim
to supremacy. Modern “scientific” racism was one result. Even the most liberal
anthropologists of the pre-First World War period, such as Franz Boas, viewed the
disappearance of many primitive civilizations as preordained; “salvage ethnography”
was developed in an attempt to describe as much of these civilizations as possible
before nature took its supposedly inevitable course.
40
Perhaps neither before nor since have anthropologists played such a prominent role
in state policy as during the Nazi era (Chapter 6). Gretchen Schafft noted that
“German and, to a lesser extent, Austrian anthropologists were involved in the
Holocaust as perpetrators, from its beginning to its conclusion...Never had their
discipline been so well respected and received. Never had practitioners been so busy
. . . while the price for not cooperating was ‘internal exile,’ joblessness, or incarcer-
ation.”
41
Prominent anthropologists such as Eugen Fischer, Adolf Würth, and Sophie
Ehrhardt flocked to lend a scientific gloss to the Nazis’ preposterous racial theories
about Jews, Roma, and Slavs; many of these “scholars” continued their work into
the postwar period.
42
However, contradictorily and simultaneously, anthropology was emerging as
the most pluralistic and least ethnocentric of the social sciences. Under the influence
of the discipline’s leading figures – Franz Boas, the revolutionary ethnographer
Bronislaw Malinowski, the Englishman A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, and the American
Margaret Mead – a methodology was developed that encouraged nonjudgmental
involvement in the lives and cultures of one’s subjects. Hierarchies of “development”
were undermined by anthropologists’ nuanced study of “primitive” societies that
proved to be extraordinarily complex and sophisticated. And the supposedly scien-
tific basis for racial hierarchy was radically undermined by work such as that of Boas,
who “researched the change in head shape across only one American generation,”
thereby “demonstrat[ing] to the world how race, language, and culture are causally
unlinked.”
43
Anthropologists played a remarkable and little-known role in drafting
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, cautioning the UN Commission
devoted to this task against “ethnocentrism, the assumption of the superiority of one’s
own cultural values.”
44
With the great wave of decolonization after the Second World
War, it was anthropologists above all who went “into the field” to grapple with, and
validate, the diversity of “Third World” societies.
Anthropology’s guiding ideal of cultural relativism requires that the practitioner
“suspend one’s judgement and preconceptions as much as possible, in order to better
understand another’s worldview.” In studying genocidal processes, the relativist
approach emphasizes “local understandings and cultural dynamics that both struc-
ture and motivate genocide,” and examines them in their broader cultural context.
Rather than “simply dismissing génocidaires as ‘irrational’ and ‘savage,’” the approach
“demands that we understand them and their perspective regardless of what we think
of perpetrators.”
45
Arguably, though, cultural relativism has its limits. At some point, if one is to
confront atrocities, one must adopt a universalist stand (i.e., that atrocities are always
SOCIOLOGY AND ANTHROPOLOGY OF GENOCIDE
297
criminal, and cannot be excused by culture). Nancy Scheper-Hughes, among others,
has criticized cultural relativism as “moral relativism” that is “no longer appropriate
to the world in which we live.” If anthropology “is to be worth anything at all, it
must be ethically grounded.”
46
Alexander Hinton likewise suggests that relativism
“played a key role in inhibiting anthropologists from studying genocide,” together
with other forms of “political violence in complex state societies.”
47
Partly because of relativist influences, and partly because of its preference for
“studying small, relatively stable communities,”
48
anthropology’s engagement with
genocide came relatively late. Only in very recent years has a “school” begun to coa-
lesce around these themes, developing a rich body of literature, particularly on terror
and genocide in Latin America and Africa. Deploying fieldwork-based ethnography
(literally, “writing about ethnic groups”), these researchers have amassed and ana-
lyzed a wealth of individual testimonies about the atrocities. In Victoria Sanford’s
estimation, this “is among the greatest contributions anthropology can make to
understanding social problems – the presentation of testimonies, life histories, and
ethnographies of violence.”
49
Together with the reports of human rights organizations
and truth commissions (see Chapter 15), these provide important evidence, for
present and future generations, of the nature and scale of atrocity.
Anthropologists go further still, to analyze how memories of atrocities (see
also Chapter 14) are interpreted within and across human cultures; how they are
adopted as coping strategies in the aftermath of genocide;
50
and how they may
become attached to familiar objects in the environment, irrupting at unexpected
moments:
[The] living memory of terror can reinvoke the physical and psychological pain
of past acts of violence in unexpected moments. A tree, for example, is not just a
tree. A river, not just a river. At a given moment, a tree is a reminder of the baby
whose head was smashed against a tree by a soldier. The tree, and the memory of
the baby it invokes, in turn reinvoke a chain of memories of terror, including
witnessing the murder of a husband or brother who was tied to another tree and
beaten to death – perhaps on the same day or perhaps years later.
51
Culturally specific practices of terror are especially well suited to anthropological
investigation. In his study of the Rwandan genocide, Sacrifice as Terror, Christopher
Taylor showed how cultural dynamics, rituals, and symbolism may help to explain
the particular course that the holocaust took. His analysis demonstrated – in
Alexander Hinton’s summary – that anthropological methods “explain why the
violence was perpetrated in certain ways – for example, the severing of Achilles
tendons, genital mutilation, breast oblation, the construction of roadblocks that
served as execution sites, bodies being stuffed into latrines.” The violence “was deeply
symbolic,” representing cultural beliefs about expulsion and excretion, obstruction
and flow.
52
For example, Taylor pointed out the symbolism of the Nyabarongo
River as a route by which murdered Tutsis were to be “removed from Rwanda and
retransported to their presumed land of origin,” thereby purifying the nation of its
internal ‘foreign’ minority.” In his interpretation,
SOCIOLOGY AND ANTHROPOLOGY OF GENOCIDE
298
Rwanda’s rivers became part of the genocide by acting as the body politic’s organs
of elimination, in a sense “excreting” its hated internal other. It is not much of a
leap to infer that Tutsi were thought of as excrement by their persecutors. Other
evidence of this is apparent in the fact that many Tutsi were stuffed into latrines
after their deaths.
53
An intimate familiarity with day-to-day cultural praxis allows anthropologists to draw
connections between “exceptional” outbursts of atrocity, such as genocide, and more
quotidian forms and structures of violence. The leading theorist in this regard is
Nancy Scheper-Hughes, who in her classic study of a Brazilian village, Death without
Weeping, explored the desensitization of women-as-mothers to the deaths of their
infant children amidst pervasive scarcity.
54
This extended even to complicity in their
offspring’s deaths through the deliberate withholding of food and care, with the
resulting mortality viewed as divinely ordained. Subsequently, Scheper-Hughes
outlined a genocidal continuum, composed:
of a multitude of “small wars and invisible genocides” conducted in the normative
social spaces of public schools, clinics, emergency rooms, hospital wards, nursing
homes, court rooms, prisons, detention centers, and public morgues. The
continuum refers to the human capacity to reduce others to nonpersons, to
monsters, or to things that give structure, meaning, and rationale to everyday
practices of violence. It is essential that we recognize in our species (and in
ourselves) a genocidal capacity and that we exercise a defensive hypervigilance, a
hypersensitivity to the less dramatic, permitted, everyday acts of violence that make
participation (under other conditions) in genocidal acts possible, perhaps more
easy than we would like to know. I would include all expressions of social exclusion,
dehumanization, depersonalization, pseudo-speciation, and reification that
normalize atrocious behavior and violence toward others.
55
She noted, for instance, that Brazilian “street children” experience attacks by police
“that are genocidal in their social and political sentiments.” The children “are often
described as ‘dirty vermin’ so that unofficial policies of ‘street cleaning,’ ‘trash
removal,’ ‘fly swatting,’ and ‘pest removal’ are invoked in garnering broad-based
public support for their extermination.” Through such practices and rhetoric,
genocide becomes “socially incremental,” something that is “experienced by perpe-
trators, collaborators, bystanders – and even by victims themselves – as expected,
routine, even justified.”
56
There seems a clear connection between such everyday
rhetoric and the propaganda discourse of full-scale genocide, in which Native
American children were referred to as “nits [who] make lice,” Jews as “vermin,” and
Rwandan Tutsis as “cockroaches.”
In closing this brief account of anthropological framings and insights, it is
worth considering the role of forensic anthropologists. Bridging the natural and social
sciences, they “have worked with health professionals, lawyers, photographers, and
nongovernmental organizations to analyze physical remains and gather evidence with
which to prosecute perpetrators.”
57
Their core activities consist of the “search for,
recovery, and preservation of physical evidence at the outdoor scene” of crimes and
SOCIOLOGY AND ANTHROPOLOGY OF GENOCIDE
299
mass atrocities. They document how evidence relates to its “depositional environ-
ment,” and use the data collected to reconstruct the events surrounding the deaths
of the exhumed victims.
58
In recent years, forensic anthropologists have become the most visible face of
anthropology in genocide investigation and adjudication. Most notable is Clyde
Snow (see Figure 11.1), a US forensic specialist who oversaw the exhumations at the
Balkans massacre sites of Vukovar and Srebrenica. (These forensic excavations form
the basis for an inevitably gruesome but illuminating book of photographs and text,
The Graves; see “Further Study.”) As Snow describes his task:
SOCIOLOGY AND ANTHROPOLOGY OF GENOCIDE
300
Figure 11.1 Forensic
anthropologist Clyde Snow,
inspecting a skull from the Anfal
Campaign in northern Iraq (see
Box 4a).
Source: Magnum Photos/
Susan Meiselas.
When [societies] choose to pursue justice, we forensic anthropologists can put
the tools of a rapidly developing science at the disposal of the survivors. We can
determine a murder victim’s age, sex and race from the size and shape of certain
bones. We can extract DNA from some skeletons and match it with samples from
the victims’ relatives. Marks on the bones can reveal signs of old diseases and
injuries reflected in the victims’ medical histories, as well as more sinister evidence:
bullet holes, cut marks from knives, or fracture patterns produced by blunt
instruments. Taken together, such clues can tell us who victims were and how
they died – clues crucial to bringing the killers to justice.
59
Snow’s first digs were conducted in Argentina during the 1980s, where he helped to
train the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team that exhumed victims of the “Dirty
War” (see also Chapter 15). “Ample forensic evidence” underpinned the report of
the Argentine truth commission, Nunca Más (Never Again), and the prosecutions
of former junta leaders.
60
The team went on to conduct exhumations in El Salvador,
at the site of the military massacre of some 700 civilians at El Mozote.
61
With
assistance from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS),
Snow subsequently trained members of the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology
Team.
62
The team’s investigations were equally vital to the truth commission report
that labeled the military regime’s campaign against Mayan Indians in the Guatemalan
highlands as genocidal (see Chapter 3), and assigned responsibility for more than
90 percent of the atrocities of the “civil war” to the government and the paramilitary
forces it mobilized.
63
Snow has conducted excavations at atrocity sites as geographically disparate as
Ethiopia, Iraq, and the Philippines. His comment on the nature of his investigations
summarizes the work of the conscientious anthropologists – and many others – who
have informed our understanding of individual genocides: “You do the work in the
daytime and cry at night.”
64
■
FURTHER STUDY
Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 2000. Influential sociological interpretation of the Jewish Holocaust.
Pierre L. van den Berghe, ed., State Violence and Ethnicity. Niwot, CO: University
Press of Colorado, 1990. One of the best sociological works on genocide and
state terror.
Paul R. Brass, ed., Riots and Pogroms. New York: New York University Press, 1996.
Vigorous edited volume on the dynamics of ethnic violence.
Amy Chua, World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic
Hatred and Global Instability. New York: Anchor, 2004. Provocative overview of
“market-dominant minorities.”
Helen Fein, Genocide: A Sociological Perspective. London: Sage, 1993. Short, influ-
ential treatise.
H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology.New
SOCIOLOGY AND ANTHROPOLOGY OF GENOCIDE
301
York: Oxford University Press, 1954. Writings of the great German theorist of
authority, modernity, and bureaucracy.
Alexander Laban Hinton, ed., Annihilating Difference: The Anthropology of Genocide.
Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002. A ground-breaking anthol-
ogy; see also Genocide: An Anthropological Reader.
Donald L. Horowitz, The Deadly Ethnic Riot. Berkeley, CA: University of California
Press, 2001. Massive, eye-opening treatise on ethnic violence.
Irving Louis Horowitz, Taking Lives: Genocide and State Power (4th edn). New
Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1997. Rambling sociological account.
Victoria Sanford, Buried Secrets: Truth and Human Rights in Guatemala.New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Sanford worked alongside the Guatemalan forensic
anthropology team.
Gretchen E. Schafft, From Racism to Genocide: Anthropology in the Third Reich.
Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2004. Explores anthropologists’ eager
complicity in Nazi social engineering.
James C. Scott, Seeing Like A State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human
Condition Have Failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998. Fascinating
study of “high-modernist” social planning, relevant to studies of state terror and
totalitarian systems.
Jeffrey A. Sluka, ed., Death Squad: The Anthropology of State Terror. Philadelphia, PA:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. Another important anthology.
Anthony D. Smith, National Identity. London: Penguin, 1991. Fine primer on the
ethnic and cultural roots of nationalism.
Wolfgang Sofsky, The Order of Terror: The Concentration Camp, trans. William
Templer. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999. Profound, aphoristic
study.
Eric Stover and Gilles Peress, The Graves: Srebrenica and Vukovar. Zurich: Scalo
Publishers, 1998. Haunting images and text of forensic excavations in Bosnia and
Croatia.
Christopher C. Taylor, Sacrifice as Terror: The Rwandan Genocide of 1994. Oxford:
Berg, 1999. Valuable anthropological insights into the Rwandan holocaust.
■
NOTES
1 See Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Small Places, Large Issues: An Introduction to Social and
Cultural Anthropology (London: Pluto Press, 2001), p. 29.
2 Horowitz quoted in Helen Fein, Genocide: A Sociological Perspective (London: Sage,
1993), p. 6.
3 Nancy Scheper-Hughes, “The Primacy of the Ethical: Propositions for a Militant
Anthropology,” Current Anthropology, 36: 3 (1995), pp. 410, 414.
4 See Alexander Laban Hinton, ed., Annihilating Difference: The Anthropology of Genocide
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002); Alexander Laban Hinton, ed.,
Genocide: An Anthropological Reader (London: Blackwell, 2002); Nancy Scheper-Hughes
and Philippe Bourgois, eds, Violence in War and Peace: An Anthology (London: Blackwell,
2004); Jeffrey A. Sluka, ed., Death Squad: The Anthropology of State Terror (Philadelphia,
PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999).
5 “Modernity,” as Hinton notes, “is notoriously difficult to define,” but “can perhaps best
SOCIOLOGY AND ANTHROPOLOGY OF GENOCIDE
302
be described as a set of interrelated processes, some of which began to develop as early as
the fifteenth century, characterizing the emergence of ‘modern society.’ Politically,
modernity involves the rise of secular forms of government, symbolized by the French
Revolution and culminating in the modern nation-state. Economically, modernity refers
to capitalist expansion and its derivatives – monetarized exchange, the accumulation of
capital, extensive private property, the search for new markets, commodification, and
industrialization. Socially, modernity entails the replacement of ‘traditional’ loyalties
(to lord, master, priest, king, patriarch, kin, and local community) with ‘modern’ ones
(to secular authority, leader, ‘humanity,’ class, gender, race, and ethnicity). Culturally,
modernity encompasses the movement from a predominantly religious to an emphatically
secular and materialist worldview characterized by new ways of thinking about and
understanding human behavior.” Hinton, “The Dark Side of Modernity: Toward an
Anthropology of Genocide,” in Hinton, ed., Annihilating Difference pp. 7–8. For an
ambitious anthology, see Stuart Hall et al., eds, Modernity: An Introduction to Modern
Societies (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996).
6 Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
2000), p. 13.
7 Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, pp. 53, 55; emphasis in original.
8 “As a conception of the world, and even more importantly as an effective instrument of
political practice, racism is unthinkable without the advancement of modern science,
modern technology and modern forms of state power. As such, racism is strictly a modern
product. Modernity made racism possible.” Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, p. 61.
9 Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, p. 76.
10 Max Weber, “Bureaucracy,” in H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds, From Max Weber:
Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1954), pp. 229, 233, 240. Lester
R. Kurtz notes that bureaucracy evinces a tendency “to promote formal rather than
substantive rationality, that is, the kind of thinking that emphasizes efficiency rather than
moral or contextual considerations.” Quoted in Robert Jay Lifton and Eric Markusen,
The Genocidal Mentality: Nazi Holocaust and Nuclear Threat (New York: Basic Books,
1990), p. 180.
11 Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, p. 76.
12 Wolfgang Sofsky, The Order of Terror: The Concentration Camp (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 264. “Modern terror has no need of big criminals.
For its purposes, the small-time tormentor suffices: the conscientious bookkeeper, the
mediocre official, the zealous doctor, the young, slightly anxious female factory worker”
(p. 278).
13 The classic study is Markusen and Kopf, The Genocidal Mentality.
14 Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, p. 89.
15 Michael Mann similarly notes that in the Nazi genocide against the Jews, “foreign
collaborators, Romanian and Croatian fascists, used primitive techniques to almost as
devastating effect” as high-tech gas chambers. Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy:
Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 241.
16 “As for the supposedly desensitizing effects of bureaucratic distancing, the brutal face-
to-face murder of the Tutsis by tens of thousands of ordinary Hutus, many of them poor
farmers, utterly disproves that thesis.” Marie Fleming, “Genocide and the Body Politic
in the Time of Modernity,” in Robert Gellately and Ben Kiernan, eds, The Specter of
Genocide: Mass Murder in Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2003), p. 103.
17 For a contrary view, defining the core features of the Rwandan holocaust as “mani-
festations of the modern world,” see Robert Melson, “Modern Genocide in Rwanda:
Ideology, Revolution, War, and Mass Murder in an African State,” ch. 15 in Gellately
and Kiernan, eds, The Specter of Genocide.
18 Anthony D. Smith, National Identity (London: Penguin, 1991), p. 21.
19 I am grateful to Benjamin Madley for this insight.
20 Barth cited in Andrew Bell-Fialkoff, Ethnic Cleansing (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin,
SOCIOLOGY AND ANTHROPOLOGY OF GENOCIDE
303
1999), p. 73. As Alexander Hinton notes, “It is one of the most vexing problems of our
time that imagined sociopolitical identities are so often forged out of hatred toward
contrasting others.” Hinton, Why Did They Kill? Cambodia in the Shadow of Genocide
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005), p. 220. For a famous reading of the
phenomenon, examining the constitutive impact of the “Orient” upon the “West,” see
Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979).
21 Geertz quoted in Ray Taras and Rajat Ganguly, Understanding Ethnic Conflict: The
International Dimension (New York: Longman, 1998), p. 14.
22 See John R. Bowen, “The Myth of Global Ethnic Conflict,” ch. 15 in Hinton, ed.,
Genocide: An Anthropological Reader, pp. 334–43.
23 Nancy Scheper-Hughes writes sardonically: “‘Race,’ ‘ethnicity,’ ‘tribe,’ ‘culture,’ and
‘identity’ were dutifully deconstructed and de-essentialized in Anthropology 101, where
they were taught as historically invented and fictive concepts. Meanwhile...South
African Xhosas and Zulus (manipulated by a government-orchestrated ‘third force’) daily
slaughtered each other in and around worker hostels in the name of ‘tribe,’ ‘ethnicity,’
and ‘culture.’” Scheper-Hughes, “The Primacy of the Ethical”, p. 415.
24 James Waller, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 153–54. He also points out (pp. 241–42)
that in social–psychological experiments, “complete strangers arbitrarily assigned to
groups, having no interaction or conflict with one another, and not competing against
another group behaved as if those who shared their meaningless label were their dearest
friends or closest relatives,” and would rapidly come into conflict with those defined
differently, but equally meaninglessly.
25 Donald L. Horowitz, The Deadly Ethnic Riot (Berkeley, CA: University of California
Press, 2001), p. 243.
26 Paul R. Brass, “Introduction,” in Brass, ed., Riots and Pogroms (Washington Square, NY:
New York University Press, 1996), p. 12.
27 Horowitz makes explicit the link between ethnic rioting and genocide: “The deadly
ethnic riot embodies physical destruction combined with degradation and the implicit
threat of genocide. . . . The random, brutal killing of targets based merely on their
ascriptive identity has ...aproto-genocidal quality about it; it is an augury of exter-
mination.” Horowitz, The Deadly Ethnic Riot, pp. 432, 459.
28 Brass, “Introduction,” pp. 12–13.
29 According to Charles Tilly, these actors “operate in a middle ground between (on one
side) the full authorization of a national army and (on the other) the private employment
of violence by parents, lovers, or feuding clans.” Tilly, The Politics of Collective Violence
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 19.
30 Horowitz, The Deadly Ethnic Riot, p. 187. See also Walter P. Zenner, “Middleman
Minorities and Genocide,” in Isidor Wallimann and Michael N. Dobkowski, eds,
Genocide and the Modern Age: Etiology and Case Studies of Mass Death (Westport, CT:
Syracuse University Press, 2000), pp. 253–81. Ground-breaking genocide scholar Leo
Kuper refers to these as “hostage groups”; that is, “hostages to the fortunes of the
dominant group.” Kuper, “The Genocidal State: An Overview,” in Pierre L. van den
Berghe, ed., State Violence and Ethnicity (Niwot, CO: University Press of Colorado,
1990), p. 44. See also the discussion in Kuper’s The Prevention of Genocide (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 1985), p. 201.
31 Amy Chua, World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred
and Global Instability (New York: Anchor, 2004), p. 79.
32 Genocidal massacres may also be cited, such as the centuries of pogroms against European
Jews, Indian uprisings against Whites in Upper Peru and Yucatán (Chapter 3), and the
Hindu slaughter of Sikhs in India in 1984. Short of genocide or genocidal massacre, the
strategy most commonly adopted against market-dominant minorities is mass expulsion.
Idi Amin’s banishing of Indians from Uganda in 1972 is an example; another is the “Boat
People” expelled from Vietnam following the nationalist victory of 1975, aimed at “the
elimination of ethnic Chinese and bourgeois Vietnamese from Vietnamese society.”
SOCIOLOGY AND ANTHROPOLOGY OF GENOCIDE
304
Richard L. Rubinstein, The Age of Triage: Fear and Hope in an Overcrowded World
(Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1983), p. 176. This was also, of course, the dominant Nazi
policy towards German Jews between 1933 and 1938 (Chapter 6).
33 Horowitz, for example, argues that “in comparative perspective,” the targeting of
“unusually prosperous or advantaged ethnic groups...is only a minor factor in target
selection [for deadly ethnic rioting], operative under certain, specific conditions of riot
leadership. Quite often, prosperous minorities are not targeted even during the most
brutal riots.” Horowitz, The Deadly Ethnic Riot, p. 5.
34 Chua, World on Fire, pp. 124–25.
35 Eriksen, Small Places, Large Issues, p. 27.
36 Eriksen, Small Places, Large Issues, p. 7.
37 Victoria Sanford, Buried Secrets: Truth and Human Rights in Guatemala (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p. 31.
38 Alexander Laban Hinton, “The Dark Side of Modernity: Toward an Anthropology of
Genocide,” in Hinton, ed., Annihilating Difference, p. 2.
39 “[T]he work of anthropology, in its earliest instances of practice, composed a necessary
first step that gave substance and justification to theories of ‘natural’ hierarchy that would
eventually be employed to rationalize racism, colonialism, slavery, ethnic purifications
and, ultimately, genocide projects.” Wendy C. Hamblet, “The Crisis of Meanings: Could
the Cure be the Cause of Genocide?,” Journal of Genocide Research, 5: 2 (2003), p. 243.
40 See also the discussion of Patrick Brantlinger’s Dark Vanishings in Chapter 3.
41 Gretchen E. Schafft, “Scientific Racism in Service of the Reich: German Anthropologists
in the Nazi Era,” in Hinton, ed., Annihilating Difference, pp. 117, 131. See also Schafft’s
full-length book, From Racism to Genocide: Anthropology in the Third Reich (Urbana, IL:
University of Illinois Press, 2004).
42 See Sybil Milton, “Holocaust: The Gypsies,” ch. 6 in Samuel Totten et al., eds, Century
of Genocide: Eyewitness Accounts and Critical Views (New York: Garland Publishing,
1997). According to the Web Hyperdictionary, “physical anthropology” is “the scientific
study of the physical characteristics, variability, and evolution of the human organism.”
See http://searchbox.hyperdictionary.com/dictionary/physical+anthropology.
43 Paul A. Erickson and Liam D. Murphy, A History of Anthropological Theory (Toronto:
Broadview Press, 2003), p. 76.
44 Geoffrey Robertson, Crimes Against Humanity: The Struggle for Global Justice (New York:
The New Press, 2000), pp. 31–32. An anthropologist, W.G. Sumner, first used the term
“ethnocentrism” in 1906, defining it as “the technical name for [a] view of things in
which one’s own group is the center of everything, and all others are scaled and rated with
reference to it. . . . Each group nourishes its own pride and vanity, boasts itself superior,
exalts its own divinities, and looks with contempt on outsiders.” Quoted in Waller,
Becoming Evil, p. 154.
45 Alexander Hinton, personal communication, July 24, 2005.
46 Scheper-Hughes, “The Primacy of the Ethical,” p. 410.
47 Hinton, “The Dark Side of Modernity,” in Hinton, ed., Annihilating Difference, p. 2.
48 Hinton, “The Dark Side of Modernity,” p. 2.
49 Sanford, Buried Secrets, p. 210. In anthropological parlance, individual testimonies
constitute the “emic” level of analysis, academic interpretations the “etic” level. See
Eriksen, Small Places, Large Issues, p. 36.
50 See, e.g., Antonius Robben, “How Traumatized Societies Remember: The Aftermath of
Argentina’s Dirty War,” Cultural Critique, 59 (winter 2005), pp. 120–64.
51 Sanford, Buried Secrets, p. 143.
52 Hinton, “The Dark Side of Modernity,” p. 19. Hinton argues that symbolism
“mediate[s] all our understandings of the world, including a world of genocide” (personal
communication, July 24, 2005). See also Arjun Appadurai, “Dead Certainty: Ethnic
Violence in the Era of Globalization,” ch. 13 in Hinton, ed., Genocide: An Anthropological
Reader, pp. 286–303.
53 Christopher C. Taylor, Sacrifice as Terror: The Rwandan Genocide of 1994 (Oxford: Berg,
SOCIOLOGY AND ANTHROPOLOGY OF GENOCIDE
305
1999), p. 130. The phenomenon has its counterpart in other genocides; as early as 1940,
the English novelist and essayist H.G. Wells pointed to “the victims smothered in
latrines” in Nazi concentration camps, exemplifying “the cloacal side of Hitlerism.”
Quoted in Robertson, Crimes Against Humanity, p. 23. For another fascinating study of
violent ritual and symbolism, see Antonius Robben, “State Terror in the Netherworld:
Disappearance and Reburial in Argentina” (in Robben, ed., Death, Mourning, and Burial:
A Cross-Cultural Reader [London: Blackwell 2005]), which explores the symbolic
violation of “disappearance” in a culture that ascribes great significance to the physical
corpse and rituals of burial.
54 Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Death without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993).
55 Nancy Scheper-Hughes, “Coming to Our Senses: Anthropology and Genocide,” in
Hinton, ed., Annihilating Difference, p. 369. See also Scheper-Hughes, “The Genocidal
Continuum: Peace-time Crimes,” ch. 2 in Jeannette Marie Mageo, ed., Power and the Self
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 29–47.
56 Scheper-Hughes, “Coming to Our Senses,” pp. 372–73.
57 Hinton, “The Dark Side of Modernity,” p. 33.
58 Dennis C. Dirkmaat and J.M. Adovasion, “The Role of Archaeology in the Recovery and
Interpretation of Human Remains from an Outdoor Forensic Setting”; cited at
http://mai.mercyhurst.edu/Foren%20Anth/What%20is.htm.
59 Clyde Snow, “Murder Most Foul,” The Sciences (May/June 1995), p. 16.
60 Snow, “Murder Most Foul,” p. 20.
61 See Leigh Binford, The El Mozote Massacre: Anthropology and Human Rights (Tucson, AZ:
University of Arizona Press, 1996); Mark Danner, The Massacre at El Mozote: A Parable
of the Cold War (New York: Vintage, 1994).
62 “Originally a five-member group, the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation
now employs more than 60 people and has carried out more than 200 exhumations.”
Victoria Sanford, personal communication, June 15, 2005.
63 The activities of the Guatemalan forensic team are movingly described by Victoria
Sanford in her book Buried Secrets, centering on exhumations in the Mayan village of
Acul.
64 See the “Clyde Snow Information Page” at http://www.ajweberman.com/cs.htm.
SOCIOLOGY AND ANTHROPOLOGY OF GENOCIDE
306
Political Science
and International
Relations
The core concern of political science is power: how it is distributed and used within
states and societies. International relations (IR) examines its use and distribution
among the state units that compose the international “system.” Historically, IR’s
overriding concern is with peace and war, though in recent decades the discipline
has grappled increasingly with the growth of international “regimes”: norms, rules,
and patterns of conduct that influence state behavior in a given issue area.
The relevance to genocide studies of all these lines of inquiry is considerable. We
have already drawn upon the contributions of political scientists and IR theorists,
notably in the analysis of “Imperialism, War, and Social Revolution” (Chapter 2). This
chapter explores four further contributions of PoliSci and IR frameworks: empirical
studies of genocide; the changing nature of war; the putative link between democracy
and peace; and the role of ethical norms in constructing effective “prohibition
regimes” worldwide.
■
EMPIRICAL INVESTIGATIONS
The most influential empirical investigators of state-directed mass killing are the US
political scientists R.J. Rummel, Barbara Harff, and Ted Gurr, the latter two often
working in tandem. Their studies have clarified considerably the scope and character
of genocidal, “politicidal,” and “democidal” murder in modern times. As with nearly
all genocide scholars, their work is preventionist in orientation (see Chapter 6).
They seek to determine the explanatory variables that can assist in identifying the
307
CHAPTER 12
genocide-prone societies of the present, and in isolating positive and constructive
features that may inoculate societies against genocide and other crimes against
humanity.
Rummel’s book Death by Government (1997) coined the term “democide” to
describe “government mass murder” – including but not limited to genocide as
defined in the UN Convention. Examining the death-toll from twentieth-century
democide, Rummel was the first to place it almost beyond the bounds of imagin-
ability. According to his detailed study, somewhere in the range of 170 million “men,
women, and children have been shot, beaten, tortured, knifed, burned, starved,
frozen, crushed, or worked to death; buried alive, drowned, hung, bombed, or killed
in any other of the myriad ways governments have inflicted death on unarmed,
helpless citizens and foreigners.”
1
If combat casualties in war are added to the picture,
“Power has killed over 203 million people in [the twentieth] century.”
2
POLITICAL SCIENCE AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
308
Figure 12.1 R.J. Rummel,
political scientist and scholar of
“democide.”
Source: Courtesy R.J. Rummel.
Rummel identifies the “most lethal regimes,” in terms of numbers of people
exterminated, as the Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin (Chapter 5), communist
China (Box 3a), Germany under the Nazis (Chapter 6 and Box 6a), and Nationalist
China (touched on briefly in Chapter 2). If the “megamurder” index is recalculated
based upon a regime’s time in power (i.e., as deaths per year), then Cambodia under
the Khmer Rouge (Chapter 7), Turkey under Kemal Atatürk, and the Nazi puppet
state in Croatia (1941–45) top the list.
Rummel discerned an underlying “Power Principle” in this human catastrophe,
namely that “Power kills; absolute Power kills absolutely”:
The more power a government has, the more it can act arbitrarily according
to the whims and desires of the elite, and the more it will make war on others and
murder its foreign and domestic subjects. The more constrained the power of
governments, the more power is diffused, checked, and balanced, the less it will
aggress on others and commit democide.
3
Accordingly, for Rummel, liberal democracies are the good guys. Only in situations
of all-out international war, or when their democratic procedures are subverted by
conniving elites, will they engage in democide on a significant scale. This argument
ties in with the “democratic peace” thesis, and I will return to Rummel’s work in
addressing that thesis below. His significance, for the present, lies in his systematic
and successful attempt to tabulate the gory toll of twentieth-century mass killing, and
to tie this to the exercise of political power (or “Power”) worldwide.
Barbara Harff and Ted Gurr have approached genocide and “politicide” – mass
killing on the basis of imputed political affiliation – through the study of ethnic
conflicts. In 1988, the authors compiled statistical data for genocides and politicides
between 1945 and 1980, and published a ground-breaking analysis that sought to
isolate where, and under what conditions, these phenomena are most likely to occur.
Harff summarized their findings as follows:
Revolutionary one-party states are the likeliest offenders. Genocides occur
with alarming frequency during or shortly after the revolutionary takeovers.
Especially dangerous are situations in which long-standing ethnic rivalries erupt
and radicalized groups armed with a revolutionary ideology gain the upper hand.
Communist ideologues tend to be most aggressive in their dealings with poten-
tial or past opposition groups. Interestingly enough, the length of democratic
experience is inversely related to the occurrence of geno/politicides.
4
The following year (1989), Gurr, working with James Scaritt, produced a valuable
compendium of “minorities at risk,” “distinguish[ing] ethnocultural minorities on
the basis of present and past political discrimination, economic discrimination, their
concentration regionally, numbers, and the minorities’ political demands.”
5
In recent
years, Harff has conducted research at the US Naval Academy “in response to
President Clinton’s policy initiative on genocide early warning and prevention,”
utilizing statistical data of the State Failure Task Force.
6
Her important article for
the American Political Science Review maintained a problematic distinction between
POLITICAL SCIENCE AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
309
genocides and politicides;
7
but her findings both buttressed and extended her earlier
work with Gurr. “Empirically, all but one of the 37 genocides and politicides that
began between 1955 and 1998 occurred during or immediately after political
upheavals...24 coincided with ethnic wars, 14 coincided with revolutionary wars,
and 14 followed the occurrence of adverse regime changes.”
8
She concluded that
“the greater the magnitude of previous internal wars and regime crises, summed over
the preceding 15 years, the more likely that a new state failure will lead to geno-/
politicide.” Among the key explanatory variables located by her study are:
• Presence or absence of genocidal precedents: “The risks of new [genocidal/
politicidal] episodes were more than three times greater when state failures
occurred in countries that had prior geno-/politicides.”
• Presence or absence of an exclusionary ideology: “Countries in which the ruling
elite adhered to an exclusionary ideology were two and a half times as likely to
have state failures leading to geno-/politicide as those with no such ideology.”
• Extent of ethnic “capture” of the state: “The risks of geno-/politicide were two
and a half times more likely in countries where the political elite was based mainly
or entirely on an ethnic minority.”
• Extent and depth of democratic institutions: “Once in place, democratic
institutions – even partial ones – reduce the likelihood of armed conflict and all
but eliminate the risk that it will lead to geno-/politicide.”
• Degree of international “openness”: “The greater their interdependence with the
global economy, the less likely that [national] elites will target minorities and
political opponents for destruction.”
Harff’s research also turned up surprises. Ethnic and religious cleavages, in and of
themselves, were strongly relevant only when combined with an ethnic minority’s
capture of the state apparatus. Poverty, which many commentators view as a virtual
recipe for social conflict including genocide, could indeed “predispose societies to
intense conflict,” but these conflicts assumed genocidal or politicidal proportions only
in tandem with features of the political system (a minority ethnicity in charge, the
promulgation of an exclusionary ideology, and the like).
Harff concluded by arguing that “the risk assessments generated...signal possible
genocides.” Among the countries she placed at highest risk were Iraq, Afghanistan,
Burma, Rwanda, Congo, and Somalia – a list with which few observers of current
affairs would quibble. In keeping with preventionist discourse, she urged policy-
makers to employ her and others’ findings to make “timely and plausible assessments”
and develop “anticipatory responses [that] should save more lives at less cost than
belated responses after killings have begun.”
9
Her variables are well worth bearing
in mind for the evaluation of genocide prevention and intervention strategies that
concludes this volume.
POLITICAL SCIENCE AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
310
■
THE CHANGING FACE OF WAR
Kalash au bilash; kalash begib al kash.
(You’re trash without a Kalashnikov [automatic rifle]; get some cash with a
Kalashnikov.)
Popular saying in Darfur, Sudan (see Box 9a)
Warfare has varied greatly over centuries and across human societies. Representatives
of all of the disciplines explored in this section have provided a rich body of conflict
case studies, and important exercises in comparative theory building.
10
War in “primitive” societies ranges from the brutal and destructive (as with
the Yanomami of Brazil and various New Guinean societies) to the largely demon-
strative and symbolic (as among many native nations of North America).
11
The great
empire builders of Central Asia laid waste to entire civilizations, but in Europe in
the early modern period, war came to be waged by and against professional armies,
with exemptions granted to civilians – in theory, and often in practice. Yet the two
most destructive wars in history were centered precisely in civilized, modern Europe,
where clashes of ideologies and national ambitions targeted principally the civilian
population.
With the advent of the nuclear age, the potential destructive power of “total wars”
became limitless. The superpowers stepped back from the brink, limiting their clashes
to wars at the periphery of their respective spheres of influence. One IR scholar even
wondered whether an “end to major war” was nigh.
12
That speculation may have been
valid – and may still be valid – in the case of international wars pitting centralized
states against each other, but a tectonic shift in the nature of war occurred during
this period. Most wars were now civil wars, pitting armed groups (usually guerrillas)
against other armed groups (usually state agents and paramilitaries) within the
borders of a single country. Often, too, these conflicts demonstrated a strong ethnic
element, although this tended to be downplayed in commentary and scholarship,
which focused on the government–guerrilla dyad. Examples are the wars in Burma,
Ethiopia, Kashmir (divided between India and Pakistan), and Guatemala; many
others could be cited.
Some scholars of international relations declared that the end of the Cold War
marked a break in the trajectory of modern war. In fact, the civil wars and “limited”
imperial wars of the Cold War era arguably laid the foundations for war as it is waged
around the world today. Conflicts in Central America (Guatemala, Nicaragua, El
Salvador) and Africa (Angola and Mozambique) were incredibly destructive – the
southern African conflicts alone killed well over a million people combined, and made
refugees of millions more. Restraints on the targeting of civilians were either lax or
non-existent. Terror strategies were widely employed, and by diverse actors: armies,
paramilitary forces, freebooters, and mercenaries, with wide scope granted to criminal
and profiteering elements. In Africa, the weapon of choice was the AK-47 automatic
rifle – one of the rare Soviet products preferred over the capitalist competition.
The Cold War’s demise magnified these trends, and added new ones. It is a truism
that the withdrawal of the superpowers from extensive military engagement in the
POLITICAL SCIENCE AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
311
Third World “lifted the lid” from simmering or dormant ethnic conflicts in many
countries. Ethnically fueled wars have increased worldwide – although it may be
debated whether this primarily reflects older tensions and conflicts, or “more
immediate and remediable causes: political manipulation, belief traps and Hobbesian
fear.”
13
Many states that had been propped up by one of the superpowers (or had played
off the US and Soviet Union against each other) collapsed in the face of concerted
popular resistance. This produced the great wave of democratization in East Asia,
Latin America, and Eastern Europe at the end of the 1980s and into the 1990s, but
it also led to “failed states,” in which no central authority exerted effective control.
Power and the means of violence devolved to decentralized networks of paramilitaries,
warlords, freebooting soldiers or former soldiers, and brigands.
In such cases, these groups were often at odds or openly at war with one another
– and usually with the civilian population as well. To shore up their power base,
warlords and freebooters sought “rents” from the civilian population – in the form
of mafia-style “protection money” or simple robbery – and from the natural resources
on their territories, so that wars in Congo, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Colombia,
among many others, were sustained by the windfall profits to be made from
POLITICAL SCIENCE AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
312
Figure 12.2 The new face of war: demobilized child soldiers in the Democratic Republic of Congo, 2002.
Source: Courtesy Dimitri Falk.
diamonds,
14
gold,
15
timber, oil, and drugs. These spoils were marketed interna-
tionally; the world had truly entered an age of globalized warfare, in which consumer
decisions in the First World had a direct impact on the course and outcome of Third
World conflicts.
16
The implications of these trends for genocides of the present and future are
profound:
• The fact that most “new wars” are civil wars means that norms of state sovereignty
are less powerful inhibitors than with international wars. The latter may be muted
or suppressed by collective security strategies deployed in recent decades. In any
case, international wars are viewed as “threats to the system,” and nearly always
provoke an international outcry. No such effective “prohibition regime” exists in
the case of civil conflicts (though one might be nascent). Contrast, for example,
the response to Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait with his much more severe
depredations against Iraqi Kurds (see Box 4a).
• New wars feature a profusion of actors and agents, often making it difficult to
determine who is doing what to whom. The most destructive war of recent times,
in Congo (Box 9a), has killed perhaps four million people. But with a mosaic of
local and outside forces, apportioning responsibility for genocide and other
atrocities – and bringing effective pressure to bear on perpetrators – are tasks
even more daunting than usual.
• To lend moral and political legitimacy to activities usually fueled by greed and
power lust, new-war actors often play up ethnic and particularist identities.
Campaigns of persecution against national and ethnic groups, including geno-
cide, become a standard modus operandi. The wars of the 1990s in West and
Central Africa and former Yugoslavia (Chapter 8) are prominent examples.
• The globalized arms trade and caches left over from Cold War struggles have
flooded the territories in which new wars occur with cheap, light weaponry.
In many countries, an AK-47 may be purchased for a few dollars. The loss of
superpower sponsorship, and political–material competition among the various
actors, spawn ever greater demands on the civilian population. Civilians may be
murdered en masse if held to be in allegiance with one of the opposing groups,
or insufficiently cooperative with extraction and taxation measures, or simply in
the way of one or another side.
• The ambiguous, uncertain, and shifting control over territories and populations
that characterizes these wars vastly increases the complexity of conflict suppression
and humanitarian intervention. IR scholars speak of “complex humanitarian
emergencies” in which war, genocide, social breakdown, starvation, refugee flows,
and internally displaced populations all combine to produce a downward spiral
of suffering and destruction. Aid agencies, journalists, and human rights monitors
are all at greater risk in such circumstances, and may thus be more reluctant to
enter the field and stay there. Without their expert witnessing and evaluations,
events on the ground are further obscured, and considerable interventionist
potential is squandered.
• If sufficient sources of “rent” can be extracted from the land and its population,
these wars can become self-perpetuating and self-sustaining. The longer they drag
POLITICAL SCIENCE AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
313
on, the likelier is massive mortality from hunger and disease – and the likelier
that the only viable source of income and self-respect (for young men but also,
increasingly, for young women) is to join a warring faction.
It is difficult to say whether the new wars are more likely to produce genocide, but
at the very least, they contain a strong genocidal potential. And, all too frequently, a
genocidal dynamic is central to the unfolding conflict.
■
DEMOCRACY, WAR, AND GENOCIDE/DEMOCIDE
Societies are known by their victims.
Richard Drinnon
Are democracies less likely to wage war and genocide against each other than are
non-democracies? Are they less likely in general to wage war and genocide?
These issues have provoked arguably the most vigorous single debate in the
international relations literature over the past three decades – the so-called “demo-
cratic peace debate.” They have also given rise to one of the few proclaimed “laws,”
perhaps the only one, in this branch of the social sciences. Democracies, it is claimed,
do not fight each other, or do so only rarely. Why might this be so? As IR scholar Errol
Henderson summarizes:
Theoretical explanations for the democratic peace emphasize either structural/
institutional factors or cultural/normative factors in preventing war between
democracies. The former posits that institutional constraints on the decision-
making choices of democratic leaders make it difficult for them to use force in their
foreign policies and act as a brake on conflict with other democracies. The latter
assumes that democracies are less disposed to fight each other due to the impact
of their shared norms that proscribe the use of violence between them.
17
A “harder” version of the democratic peace hypothesis, advanced by R.J. Rummel,
argues that democracies are far less likely than authoritarian states to commit demo-
cide, whether against their own populations or against others. Rummel concedes
that democracies sometimes perpetrate democide, but “almost all of this...is foreign
democide during war, and consists mainly of those enemy civilians killed in
indiscriminate urban bombing.” Acknowledging other examples, he claims that they
are exceptions that prove the rule: “In each case the killing was carried out in a highly
undemocratic fashion: in secret, behind a conscious cover of lies and deceit, and by
agencies and power holders that had the wartime authority to operate autonomously.
All were shielded by tight censorship of the press and control of journalists.” In order
for democratic states to become democidal, therefore, what makes them democratic
has to be suspended, at least temporarily.
18
There is much that is intuitively appealing about Rummel’s formulations, and
those of other proponents of the democratic peace hypothesis. First, it seems evident
that genocides inflicted by democracies against their own populations are rare. One
POLITICAL SCIENCE AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
314
can think of exceptions – Sri Lanka in the 1980s is sometimes cited – but they
do not come readily to mind. By contrast, this book overflows with examples
of authoritarian, dictatorial, tyrannical, and totalitarian governments slaughtering
their own populations (the USSR under Lenin and Stalin; China before and after
the communist revolution; Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge; and so on). At a
glance, too, the “law” that democracies do not fight each other seems empirically
robust.
Things become more complicated, however, when we consider the history of
colonizing liberal democracies; the nature of some of the indigenous societies they
attacked; the secretive and anti-democratic character of violence by both democratic
and authoritarian states; and the latter-day comportment of democracies, including
the global superpower and non-Western democracies.
As we saw in Chapter 3, the strategy adopted towards indigenous peoples by
Western colonial powers – in most cases, the most democratic states of their age –
was frequently genocidal. Other, less democratic states were less likely to aggress
internationally than the liberal democracies of the time (which were also, of course,
the most technologically advanced countries, and hence best equipped to impose
violence on others).
19
The character of the indigenous societies that the colonialists confronted, more-
over, was often no less democratic than the colonial states themselves – sometimes
more so. As sociologist Michael Mann has noted:
The “democratic peace” school have excluded groups like the [North American]
Indian nations from their calculations on the somewhat dubious grounds that
they did not have permanent differentiated states of the “modern” type. Though
this is convenient for the self-congratulatory tone of much of their writings[,]
it is illegitimate even by their own definitions. For Indian nations did develop
permanent constitutional states through the mid-nineteenth century – for
example, the Cherokee in 1827, the Choctaw, Chickasaw and Creeks in the period
1856–1867.
20
Thus, when genocidal campaigns were waged against these nations, “liberal democ-
racies were actually committing genocide against other democracies, repeatedly.” In
fact, Mann suggested, “If we counted up separately the cases where ‘the people’ of
the United States, Canada and Australia committed mass murder on the individual
Indian and aboriginal nations, we could probably tip Rummel’s statistical scales over
to the conclusion that democratic regimes were more likely to commit genocide than
were authoritarian states.”
21
In examining international involvement in mass violence and atrocity, there is little
doubt that the most consistently and aggressively violent country over the past half-
century is also the world’s leading liberal democracy. Whatever the brutality of the
Soviets in Hungary (1956) or in Afghanistan (see Chapter 2), no power approaches
the United States when it comes to instigation of, and complicity in, conflicts and
atrocities worldwide. The majority of this violence, moreover, was not conducted
through formal participation in formally declared wars, but took place “covertly.”
22
As we saw, Rummel generalized about this theme, claiming that democratic democide
POLITICAL SCIENCE AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
315
represents a stark departure from democratic norms. But then, wonders Errol
Henderson, should these agents of mass violence really be classed as democracies?
23
Mann, for his part, pointed out that the enabling variables which Rummel cited
for “democratic democide” – secrecy, censorship, lying, deceit – are also those which
have typically enabled mass killing by non-democratic states. Authoritarian genocides
similarly tend to be committed in wartime, and with attempts at secrecy. “Hitler
committed almost all his murders during the war, and he did not dare make them
public – indeed, nor did Stalin.”
24
Henderson, revisiting the data-set on democratic peace compiled by John Oneal
and Bruce Russett (1997), pointed to sharp differences among Western liberal
democracies, on one hand, and those he classified as “Hindu” democracies (India
and Sri Lanka) and “Other” democracies (notably Israel), on the other. By retabu-
lating Oneal and Russett’s numbers, Henderson found that “Western democracies
were significantly less likely to initiate interstate wars,” but Hindu and other
democracies “were significantly more likely to initiate them.”
25
On balance, and crucially including “extrastate” wars (wars against non-state
entities, usually in a colonial and imperial context), “democratic states [are] in fact
significantly more likely to become involved in – and to initiate – interstate wars and
militarized international disputes,” according to Henderson.
26
With regard to extra-
state wars, “Western states – including the Western democracies – are more likely”
to initiate and involve themselves in such conflicts. He concluded, provocatively
and counter-intuitively, that “for all of its positive value as an egalitarian form of
government, one of the key threats to peace for individual states is the presence
of a democratic regime.”
27
What can we take away from these diverse arguments? First, even the skeptic
Henderson acknowledges the “positive value” of democracy “as an egalitarian form
of government.” As Rummel argued, consolidated democratic regimes are much less
likely to wage war and genocide against their own populations than are tyrannical
states.
On the other hand, liberal democracy is no guarantee against domestic killing, as
millions of indigenous peoples discovered. Nor, in a world where the greatest
perpetrator of international violence is the liberal-democratic superpower, can
democracy be seen as a cure-all.
28
■
NORMS AND PROHIBITION REGIMES
International relations scholars have increasingly studied the role of norms and
regimes in global affairs, notably (for our purposes) humanitarian norms and
prohibition regimes. Regimes were defined by Stephen Krasner as “principles, norms,
rules, and decision-making procedures around which actor expectations converge in
a given issue-area.” Norms are “specific prescriptions or proscriptions for action,”
while principles are “standards of behavior defined in terms of rights and obliga-
tions.”
29
Ethan Nadelmann has defined prohibition regimes as sets of “norms...which
prohibit, both in international law and in the domestic criminal law of states, the
POLITICAL SCIENCE AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
316
involvement of state and nonstate actors in particular activities.” Such regimes
emerge:
like municipal criminal laws . . . for a variety of reasons: to protect the interests
of the state and other powerful members of society; to deter, suppress, and punish
undesirable activities; to provide for order, security, and justice among members
of a community; and to give force and symbolic representation to the moral values,
beliefs, and prejudices of those who make the law.
30
The key player in transforming norms into international regimes, especially prohi-
bition regimes, is the norm entrepreneur, “an individual or organization that sets out
to change the behaviour of others,”
31
and the principled-issue networks that norm
entrepreneurs create. The history of the prohibition regime against genocide, weak
and underdeveloped as it currently is, provides an excellent example of such entre-
preneurship. Raphael Lemkin’s decades-long campaign to develop a norm against
genocide eventually generated a principled-issue network of scholars, government
representatives, legal specialists, and human-rights activists; this network has grown
exponentially, and exerted a real though limited influence on global politics.
Lemkin’s campaign was described in general terms in Chapter 1. Here, I want to
examine the nuts and bolts of his anti-genocide strategy, to demonstrate how
successful norm entrepreneurship proceeds. (This discussion again draws heavily on
Samantha Power’s depiction of Lemkin’s mission in “A Problem from Hell” ).
32
First, Lemkin perceived an important void in existing international law. While
legislation and even military intervention were countenanced in cases of interstate
violence, states had free rein to inflict violence on their own populations. To generate
a norm and prohibition regime against such actions, a potent existing norm, and
a defining regime of world affairs, had to be eroded. This was the norm of state
sovereignty, and the international regime (the Westphalian state system) that it
underpinned. As long as states forswore intervention in the “internal” affairs of other
states, a principal cause of human suffering could not be confronted.
To define a new norm and sell it to the world, Lemkin invented a word that
addressed the “crime without a name,” as Winston Churchill had described Nazi
atrocities in Eastern Europe. Lemkin struggled to find “a word that could not be
used in other contexts (as ‘barbarity’ and ‘vandalism’ could)...one that would bring
with it ‘a color of freshness and novelty’ while describing something ‘as shortly and
as poignantly as possible.’”
33
The term he finally settled on – genocide – proved to
be one of the core catalyzing ideas of the twentieth century. With unprecedented
speed, it led to the drafting of an international Convention against genocide, the
foundation of a prohibition regime that today exhibits growing strength and
complexity.
With his evocative term in hand, Lemkin physically planted himself at the heart
of postwar international legislation and regime formation. In the surprisingly
informal surroundings of United Nations headquarters, then housed in an abandoned
war plant on Long Island, Lemkin obsessively lobbied delegates to the new orga-
nization, spending “endless hours haunting the drafty halls.”
34
Few delegates escaped
his (usually unwanted) attentions. From his one-room Manhattan apartment,
POLITICAL SCIENCE AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
317
Lemkin fired off literally thousands of letters to government officials and politicians,
religious and cultural figures, newspapers and their editors and assistant editors
and reporters. In addition, “friends, friends of friends, and acquaintances of
acquaintances” were drafted to the cause, providing background information and
fresh contacts.
Throughout his campaign, Lemkin engaged in norm grafting. The task of the norm
entrepreneur is greatly eased if s/he can point to previous, congruent norms that
have achieved wide acceptance. If A, why not B? (If slavery is wrong, why not forced
labor? If voting rights are extended to all adult males, why not to women?) Such
grafting presumes a desire for moral and rhetorical consistency on the part of policy-
makers and publics.
35
Thus, Lemkin pointed to the huge gap in the evolving
prohibition regime against war crimes and crimes against humanity. “If piracy was
an international crime, he could not understand why genocide was not.” In a similar
vein, Lemkin wrote in the New York Times: “It seems inconsistent with our concepts
of civilization that selling a drug to an individual is a matter of worldly concern [i.e.,
the basis for an international prohibition regime], while gassing millions of human
beings might be a problem of internal concern.”
36
Norm entrepreneurs frequently exploit historical moments that provide a favorable
environment for norm adoption and regime creation. These moments usually
follow major upheavals that weaken preconceptions and undermine established
frameworks. Lemkin’s fortunate conjuncture was the “multilateral moment” (Power’s
phrase) immediately following the Second World War. In a few years, many of the
international organizations, legal instruments, and regimes of today were first
developed (often grafted onto previous institutions and regimes, as the UN grew out
of the League of Nations). The revelation of the full horror of Nazi rule, especially
the indelible reports and images from the death camps, undermined the legitimacy
of state sovereignty as a shield against intervention and prosecution on humanitarian
grounds.
Lemkin’s greatest achievement was the UN Genocide Convention. “Just four years
after Lemkin had introduced ‘genocide’ to the world, the General Assembly had
unanimously passed a law banning it.” Lemkin now turned his efforts (which by this
point were undermining his health) to lobbying for ratification of the treaty, and the
transformation of his norm into an effective prohibition regime. Using classic tactics
of the norm entrepreneur, Lemkin crafted his messages and appeals carefully,
individually, and with an eye for utilitarian impact. “He sent letters out in English,
French, Spanish, Hebrew, Italian, and German. Long before computers or photo-
copiers” – two of the most powerful tools of the contemporary norm entrepreneur
– “he handcrafted each letter to suit the appropriate individual, organization, or
country....He wrote to the leaders of the most influential political parties, the heads
of the private women’s or civic groups, and the editors of prominent newspapers.”
He also “attempted to mobilize American grassroots groups” and “enlisted a panoply
of American civic organizations, churches, and synagogues.”
37
With few material
resources of his own, he “borrowed stationery from supportive community organi-
zations, applied for grants to pay for postage, and sent thousands of letters to
absolutely anybody whose moral heartstrings he felt he might tug or on whose
connections he might prey to get the ear of a US senator.”
38
POLITICAL SCIENCE AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
318
According to Power, Lemkin “varied his pitch,” tailoring his message carefully
and sometimes cynically to the object of his appeal. “If a country had experienced
genocide in the past, he reminded its citizens of the human costs of allowing it. But
if a country had committed genocide in the past, as Turkey had done [against the
Armenians], Lemkin was willing to keep the country’s atrocities out of the discussion,
so as not to scare off a possible signatory” to the convention.
39
For similar reasons,
Lemkin had avoided pushing for the inclusion of political groups in the UN
definition of genocide. This, he feared, would provoke resistance among states fearful
of having their political persecutions labeled as genocide. (In any case, Lemkin had
never cared much about political groups. He did not consider them to be bearers of
human culture in the same – archaic? – way that he viewed ethnonational groups.)
With his reluctance to include political groups, Lemkin contributed to some of
the conceptual and legal confusion that has since surrounded the UN Convention.
40
On balance, though, it is hard to disagree with his own self-estimation (in pitching
his story to publishers): that his life “shows how a private individual almost single
handedly can succeed in imposing a moral law on the world and how he can stir world
conscience to this end.”
41
IR theorists of norms and regimes describe a tipping point followed by a norm
cascade in the diffusion of norms, analogous to the paradigm shifts in scientific
knowledge studied by Thomas Kuhn.
42
One norm displaces another, decisively and
definitively. At this point, norms become strongly entrenched in international
regimes, including effective prohibition regimes.
With respect to the norm against genocide and crimes against humanity, we can
observe that it has partially, not yet decisively, displaced the norm of state sovereignty.
It appeared possible, in the immediate postwar period, that a tipping from sovereignty
to cosmopolitanism and international governance could occur, but this idealistic
vision faded rapidly with the onset of the Cold War. It does not seem a great deal closer
to realization today, especially given the reluctance of the United States to participate
in a range of key prohibition regimes, and its active undermining of others (such as
the Torture Convention, the Geneva Conventions, and the International Criminal
Court).
Thus, while the drive to suppress and prevent genocide has indeed spawned a norm
and a prohibition regime, it is applied only weakly and inconsistently – compared,
say, with norms against state-sponsored slavery, nuclear proliferation, assassination
of foreign leaders, or piracy and hijacking.
43
The anti-genocide movement is best
classed with a range of other norms and regimes that have made significant strides,
but have yet to entrench themselves in international affairs: those against capital
punishment, trafficking (in human beings, drugs, and ivory), and theft of intellectual
property, to name a few.
In his seminal study of prohibition regimes, Ethan Nadelmann developed a five-
stage model for their evolution. At first, “most societies regard the targeted activity
as entirely legitimate”; indeed, “states are often the principal protagonists.” Then,
the activity is redefined as morally problematic or evil, “generally by international
legal scholars, religious groups, and other moral entrepreneurs.” Next, “regime
proponents begin to agitate actively for the suppression and criminalization of the
activity.” If this stage is successful, “the activity becomes the subject of criminal laws
POLITICAL SCIENCE AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
319
and police actions throughout much of the world.” In the fifth and final stage, “the
incidence of the proscribed activity is greatly reduced, persisting only on a small
scale and in obscure locations.”
44
Using this model, we can position the anti-genocide
regime – and the other comparatively weak regimes mentioned above – between
Nadelmann’s third stage, with “regime proponents...agitat[ing] actively for the
suppression and criminalization of the activity,” and stage four, in which the regime
is “the subject of criminal laws and police actions throughout much of the world.”
Most weaker prohibition regimes suffer from a number of debilities. They may
be relatively recent (many were at Nadelmann’s first stage of evolution just a few
decades ago). Their core concepts or “catalyzing ideas” may be prone to ambiguities
of definition and application. Enforcement mechanisms are underdeveloped, and
often corrupt – suggesting a lack of political will, and attesting to the failure of activist
mobilization to spur political actors to meaningful effort. All of these factors are
evident in the case of the anti-genocide regime.
Prohibition regimes are also hampered where strong counter-incentives exist.
It remains in the interest of vast numbers of ordinary people (or smaller numbers of
powerful people) to undermine the regime and weaken its application. Just as the lure
of illegal drugs for both consumers and vendors outweighs the ability of states to
suppress these substances, so genocide holds an enduring appeal as a problem-solving
strategy for states and other actors.
45
According to Nadelmann, however, prohibition regimes are more likely to succeed
when the targeted activity has a strong transnational dimension; when unilateral
and bilateral means of enforcement are inadequate; when a norm “reflects not just
self-interest but a broadly acknowledged moral obligation”; and when the activity
is vulnerable “to global suppression efforts by states.”
46
IR theorists Margaret Keck
and Kathryn Sikkink point out additionally that prohibition regimes are boosted
when “the causal chain [is] short,” when “causes can be assigned to the deliberate
‘intentional’ actions of identifiable individuals,” and when a universalistic “concern
with bodily harm” underlies the prohibition effort.
47
In all these respects, the anti-
genocide regime holds considerable potential. This may bode well for its future
strengthening.
■
FURTHER STUDY
Susan Burgerman, Moral Victories: How Activists Provoke Multilateral Action. Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 2001. Concise study with a Latin American
focus.
Errol A. Henderson, Democracy and War: The End of an Illusion? Boulder, CO: Lynne
Rienner, 2002. Myth-shattering analysis of democracies’ involvement in
international conflict.
Kalevi J. Holsti, The State, War, and the State of War. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996. Arguably the best introduction to global transformations
in warfare.
Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era. Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2001. Another core text of the new security studies.
POLITICAL SCIENCE AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
320
Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks
in International Politics. Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1998.
The role of transnational nongovernmental networks in norm entrepreneurship
and regime formation.
Stephen D. Krasner, ed., International Regimes. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1983. Ground-breaking study.
R.J. Rummel, Death by Government. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers,
1994. Comprehensive survey of government-directed mass killing, marred by
cheerleading for liberal democracy.
Ward Thomas, The Ethics of Destruction: Norms and Force in International Relations.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001. Elegantly written study of normative
constraints on war-making.
■
NOTES
1 R.J. Rummel, Death by Government (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1994).
He considers this a fairly conservative estimate: “The dead could conceivably be nearly
360 million people.” Rummel maintains an extensive website on democide at http://
www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/welcome.html.
2 Rummel, Death by Government, p. 13. “If all these dead were laid out head to
toe, assuming each to be an average of 5 feet tall, they would reach from Honolulu,
Hawaii, across the vast Pacific and then the huge continental United States to
Washington DC on the East Coast, and then back again almost twenty times” (emphasis
in original).
3 Rummel, Death by Government, pp. 1–2.
4 Harff quoted in Helen Fein, Genocide: A Sociological Perspective (London: Sage, 1993),
p. 40.
5 Fein, Genocide, p. 96. See Ted R. Gurr and James R. Scaritt, “Minorities at Risk: A
Global Survey,” Human Rights Quarterly, 11: 3 (1989), pp. 375–405; more recently, Ted
Robert Gurr, Peoples versus States: Minorities at Risk in the New Century (Washington,
DC: US Institute of Peace Press, 2000).
6 Barbara Harff, “No Lessons Learned from the Holocaust? Assessing Risks of Genocide
and Political Mass Murder since 1955,” American Political Science Review, 97: 1 (February
2003), p. 57. The State Failure Task Force “was established in 1994 in response to a
request from senior US policymakers to design and carry out a data-driven study of the
correlates of state failure, defined to include revolutionary and ethnic wars, adverse or
disruptive regime transitions, and genocides and politicides.”
7 For example, Harff writes (“No Lessons Learned . . . ?,” p. 58): “In common usage the
Kurds of Iraq are said to be victims of genocide. In fact many Iraqi Kurds serve in the
Iraqi bureaucracy and military and some are members of the ruling Baath Party. The
Kurds who were targeted for destruction in the al Anfal campaign of 1987 [see Box 4a]
were the mainly rural supporters of the Kurdish Democratic Party and the Patriotic
Union of Kurdistan. Thus, the event was a politicide.” But if this distinction holds, then
two of the three best-known genocides of the twentieth century – of Armenians and
Rwandan Tutsis – should also probably be reclassified as “politicides.” In the mass killing
campaign of 1915–17 (Chapter 4), Turks defended their assault on Armenians as a
reaction to the victims’ supposed affiliation with rebel groups and the Russian enemy; not
until much later (after the First World War) was the killing extended to Armenians
outside the main “rebel” areas of Turkey or in neighboring countries. Likewise, Rwandan
Tutsis were seen by the “Hutu Power” extremists as a fifth column for Tutsi rebels
invading from Uganda; at no point in the 1994 genocide was there an attempt to extend
POLITICAL SCIENCE AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
321
the killing to Tutsis residing outside Rwanda, in Uganda, Congo (then Zaire), and
Burundi.
It is interesting to note that in her earlier writing (1987), Harff subsumed politicide
under genocide: “My definition of genocide differs from the official definition . . . insofar
as it broadens the scope of the victims and perpetrators. Thus, political opponents are
included in my definition, though they lack the formal legal protection of the Convention
on Genocide.” Harff, “The Etiology of Genocide,” in Michael N. Dobkowski and Isidor
Wallimann, eds, The Age of Genocide: Etiology and Case Studies of Mass Death (Westport,
CT: Greenwood Press, 1987), p. 44.
8 Harff, “No Lessons Learned...?,” p. 62.
9 Harff, “No Lessons Learned...?,” p. 72.
10 For an extensive interdisciplinary sampling, see my “Bibliography of War” at http://
adamjones.freeservers.com/bibliography_of_war.htm.
11 According to David Kertzer, “in many parts of the world, warfare itself is highly
ritualized, with a special permanent site for the hostilities, special bodily adornment,
special songs and verbal insults, and rules about the actual conduct of combat. In many
of these cases, as soon as an individual is seriously wounded, hostilities cease and a round
of post-battle ritual begins.” Kertzer quoted in Charles Tilly, The Politics of Collective
Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 86.
12 See John E. Mueller, Retreat from Doomsday: The Obsolescence of Major War (New York:
Basic Books, 1989).
13 Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 1999), p. 141. For example, one of the most conflict-ridden
countries in the world over the past three decades has been Somalia, yet this is “perhaps
Africa’s most homogeneous country from an ethnic point of view.” Tilly, The Politics of
Collective Violence, p. 72.
14 See Greg Campbell, Blood Diamonds: Tracing the Deadly Path of the World’s Most Precious
Stones (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2002).
15 See, e.g., Human Rights Watch, The Curse of Gold, June 2005, http://www.hrw.org/
reports/2005/drc0505/.
16 This too has a precedent in the “limited” wars of the 1980s, when Nicaraguan contra
rebels and the mujahadeen Islamists in Afghanistan trafficked drugs to finance weapons
purchases, with the tacit approval and sometimes active complicity of the US
government. See Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies,
and the CIA in Central America (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991). For
an overview of contemporary trends in historical context, see Peter Dale Scott, Drugs, Oil,
and War: The United States in Afghanistan, Colombia, and Indochina (Lanham, MD:
Rowman & Littlefield, 2003).
17 Errol A. Henderson, Democracy and War: The End of an Illusion? (Boulder, CO: Lynne
Rienner, 2002), p. 4. See also Tarak Barkawi and Mark Laffey, Democracy, Liberalism,
and War: Rethinking the Democratic Peace Debate (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner,
2001).
18 Rummel, Death by Government, pp. 14, 17. Among the other cases of “democratic
democide” that Rummel cites in passing (pp. 14–16) are: “the large-scale massacres of
Filipinos during the bloody US colonization of the Philippines at the beginning of [the
twentieth] century, deaths in British concentration camps in South Africa during the Boar
[sic] War, civilian deaths due to starvation during the British blockade of Germany in and
after World War I, the rape and murder of helpless Chinese in and around Peking in
1900 [while crushing the Boxer Rebellion], the atrocities committed by Americans in
Vietnam, the murder of helpless Algerians during the Algerian War by the French, and
the unnatural deaths of German prisoners of war in French and US POW camps after
World War II.”
19 I do not mean to suggest that only democracies aggressed in this fashion – the counter-
examples of Tsarist Russia and Imperial Japan may be cited – but rather that democracy
seems to have provided no check to such aggression.
POLITICAL SCIENCE AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
322
20 Michael Mann, “The Dark Side of Democracy: The Modern Tradition of Ethnic and
Political Cleansing,” New Left Review, 235 (May–June 1999), pp. 18–46.
21 Mann, “The Dark Side of Democracy,” p. 26. On the same page, Mann argues that
“deliberate genocidal bursts were more common among British than Spanish or
Portuguese settlers. In both cases, we find that the stronger the democracy among the
perpetrators, the greater the genocide.”
22 I have prepared a table of “Key Instances of US Involvement in Mass Violence against
Civilians since 1953” to buttress this claim: see http://www.genocidetext.net/us_
violence.pdf. See also the bibliography of much of the “dissident” literature on US state
violence supplied in Adam Jones, “Introduction: History and Complicity,” in Jones, ed.,
Genocide, War Crimes and the West: History and Complicity (London: Zed Books, 2004),
pp. 26–30.
23 See Henderson, Democracy and War, p. 82; emphasis added.
24 Mann, “The Dark Side of Democracy,” p. 20.
25 Henderson, Democracy and War, p. 66; emphasis added.
26 Henderson, Democracy and War, p. 17.
27 Henderson, Democracy and War, p. 73; emphasis added.
28 It is also worth recalling the destruction inflicted by global capitalism under a liberal-
democratic aegis, as noted in Chapter 1’s discussion of structural violence.
29 Stephen Krasner, “Structural Causes and Regime Consequences: Regimes as Intervening
Variables,” International Organization, 36: 2 (1982), pp. 185–205.
30 Ethan Nadelmann, “Global Prohibition Regimes: The Evolution of Norms in
International Society,” International Organization, 44: 4 (1990), pp. 479–526.
31 Ann Florini, “The Evolution of International Norms,” International Studies Quarterly,40
(1996), p. 375.
32 Samantha Power, “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide (New York:
Basic Books, 2002). Power does not adopt the norm-entrepreneur framing, however; and
I do not, of course, ascribe to Raphael Lemkin the vocabulary of norms, regimes, and so
on.
33 Power, “A Problem from Hell,” p. 42.
34 Power, “A Problem from Hell,” p. 51.
35 The concept is similar to Keck and Sikkink’s formulation of “moral leverage” as exercised
by activist networks: “Material leverage comes from linking the issue of concern to
money, trade, or prestige, as more powerful institutions or governments are pushed to
apply pressure. Moral leverage pushes actors to change their practices by holding their
behavior up to international scrutiny, or by holding governments or institutions
accountable to previous commitments and principles they have endorsed.” Margaret E.
Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International
Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), p. 201.
36 Power, and Lemkin quoted in Power, “A Problem from Hell,” p. 48; emphasis added. In
similar fashion, activists seeking to memorialize certain genocides may also draw upon
genocidal precedents. Thus, “proliferating Armenian discourses on [the genocide of]
1915 were coloured by connections with the Jewish Holocaust. This was entirely natural,
given the proximity of the ‘final solution,’ the growing public awareness of it in the 1960s
in the aftermath of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, and the fact that the Nazi campaigns of
genocide had given decisive impetus to the establishment of the genocide convention.”
Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the
Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 217.
37 Power, “A Problem from Hell,” p. 72.
38 Power, “A Problem from Hell,” p. 71.
39 Power, “A Problem from Hell,” pp. 63–64.
40 Nor did Lemkin draw the line at behavior that many found boorish, if it would advance
his cause. Power describes his “mix of flattery and moral prodding . . . [which] sometimes
slipped into bluntly bullying his contacts and demanding that they acquire a conscience.”
“A Problem from Hell,” p. 71.
POLITICAL SCIENCE AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
323
41 Lemkin quoted in Power, “A Problem from Hell,” p. 77.
42 The term “norm cascade” was coined by Martha Finnemore and Kathryn Sikkink in
“International Norm Dynamics and Political Change,” International Organization, 52: 4
(autumn 1998), pp. 901–2. See also Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
43 “Piracy may be regarded as the very first ‘crime against humanity,’ its peculiarly barbaric
quality derived from the taking of lives which were especially vulnerable while outside
the protective realm of any nation.” Geoffrey A. Robertson, Crimes against Humanity:
The Struggle for Global Justice (New York: The New Press, 2000), p. 208. Accordingly,
the international regime against piracy might be regarded as the first in history, with the
possible exception of that against assassinating state leaders and diplomatic repre-
sentatives.
44 Nadelmann, “Global Prohibition Regimes,” pp. 484–86.
45 See Catherine Barnes, “The Functional Utility of Genocide: Towards a Framework for
Understanding the Connection between Genocide and Regime Consolidation,
Expansion and Maintenance,” Journal of Genocide Research, 7: 3 (September 2005),
pp. 309–30.
46 Nadelmann, “Global Prohibition Norms,” p. 491.
47 Keck and Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders, pp. 27, 53, 195.
POLITICAL SCIENCE AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
324
Gendering Genocide
It is recommended that the definition [of genocide] should be extended to include a
sexual group such as women, men, or homosexuals.
Benjamin Whitaker, Revised and Updated Report on the Question of the Prevention
and Punishment of Genocide (the UN Whitaker Report), 1985
The gender dimension of genocide and other crimes against humanity has only
recently attracted sustained attention. Leading the way in the inquiry were feminist
scholars, who paid particular attention to rape and sexual assault against women,
and pressed for such crimes to be considered strategies of genocide. Other scholars
and commentators have concentrated on the gender-selective killing of girl infants
through female infanticide or denial of adequate nutrition and health care.
The term “gender” is one of the most contested in the social sciences. Not long
ago, it was assumed that gender could be clearly distinguished from biological/
physiological sex. Gender meant the way that societies and cultures ascribed particular
“feminine” and “masculine” roles, expectations, and values to (biological) males versus
females. This vocabulary still has its strong proponents.
1
In the past decade or so,
however, the distinction between biological/physiological sex and cultural gender
has begun to break down. Increasingly, scholars and activists argue that sex and gender
overlap and are mutually constitutive. Such is the view of international relations
scholar Joshua Goldstein, who views a strict gender–sex distinction as “construct[ing]
a false dichotomy between biology and culture.” Goldstein accordingly “use[s]
‘gender’ to cover masculine and feminine roles and bodies alike, in all their aspects,
325
CHAPTER 13
including the (biological and cultural) structures, dynamics, roles and scripts
associated with each gender group.”
2
His definition also guides discussion in this
chapter. It allows us to explore the gendering of genocide both in its destructive
impact on male and female bodies, and with regard to the cultural practices that
influence physical experience.
Gender is not synonymous with women/femininity, despite its close association
with feminist-influenced scholarship and policy-making. Some feminists have
contended that gender means the oppression of women by men,
3
resulting in a certain
tone-deafness to the particular ways in which men and masculinities are often the
target of abuse and discrimination, up to and including genocidal atrocities. This
chapter adopts a more inclusive view of gender. Indeed, it begins with one of the least-
studied aspects of contemporary genocide: the gendercidal (gender-selective) killing
of males.
■
GENDERCIDE VS. ROOT-AND-BRANCH GENOCIDE
The gendercidal targeting of a community’s adult males, usually accompanied
by slavery and/or concubinage for out-group women, has deep roots. In Homer’s
Odyssey (9: 39–61), the hero Odysseus describes his raid on Ismaros: “I pillaged the
town and killed the men. The women and treasure...I divided as fairly as I could
among all hands.”
4
The Greek historian Thucydides (fifth century
BCE
) recorded
a dialog between Athenian representatives and delegates from Melos, resisting
Athenian control. In the military show-down that resulted, wrote Thucydides, “the
Melians surrendered unconditionally to the Athenians”; the latter then “put to death
all the men of military age whom they took, and sold the women and children as
slaves.”
5
It is impossible to know how common this pattern of gender-selective slaughter
of males was, compared with the root-and-branch extermination of every member
of the opposing group – women, children, and the elderly along with adult men. (The
term “root-and-branch” is also implicitly gendered: the root is the female that gives
birth to the branch, the child. Thus, root-and-branch genocides are those that expand
beyond adult males to remaining sectors of the targeted population.)
6
In the modern era, gendercides against “battle-age” males have been more frequent
than campaigns of root-and-branch annihilation. There is a brutal logic in this.
Genocide usually occurs in the context of military conflict, or precipitates it. Males
are everywhere those primarily designated to “serve” in the military. A deranged
form of military thinking dictates that all men of battle age, whether combatant or
non-combatant, are legitimate targets.
7
In general, then, men are cast as “provocative targets,” in Donald Horowitz’s
phrase:
Experimental data indicate that provocative targets are more likely victims of
aggression than are nonprovocative targets and that aggression may be regarded
as less legitimate when the victim is weak or fails to retaliate. Men are attacked in
riots and singled out for atrocities much more than women are, just as males are
GENDERING GENOCIDE
326
attacked more frequently than females are in experiments, and the skewing in both
seems positively related to the strength of the target.
8
As this suggests, there is also a logic to the physical preservation of women. They are
deemed to pose no military threat, or a lesser one. They may have value as slaves
and/or concubines. In addition, male-dominant society is overwhelmingly patrilineal,
with descent traced through the father. The woman may be viewed as a “blank slate,”
able to adopt, or at least provide a conduit for, the ethnicity of a male impregnator;
women may even be held to contribute nothing to the genetic mix per se. (This was
a prominent theme as recently as the Rwandan genocide of 1994.)
9
Reflecting such gendered assumptions and social structures, many cultures
– perhaps most pervasively those of the Western world between the medieval era
and the twentieth century – evolved norms of war that dictated protection for
“civilians.” This term also assumed gendered connotations, such that even today
the phrase “women and children” seems synonymous with “civilian.”
10
Of course,
once women and children have been removed from the equation, only adult men
remain, consigning this group to non-civilian status – though degrees of protection
may be extended on the basis of (old) age or demonstrable non-combatant status
(e.g., handicapped or injured men).
A key question with regard to gender and mass killing is, therefore: Will genocidal
forces view the slaughter of “battle-age” males as a sufficient expression of the
genocidal impulse? Or will they also target children, women, and the elderly? The
resolution to the question usually unfolds sequentially: once the younger adult male
population group has been targeted, will remaining population groups then be
slaughtered? Obviously, removing the group most closely associated with military
activity, and hence military resistance, makes targeting other group members easier,
logistically speaking. It may be much harder, however, to motivate genocidal killers
to do their work, given norms against targeting these “helpless” populations.
The twentieth and twenty-first centuries have witnessed both core types of
genocide, as we have seen throughout this volume. Typical of gendercidal strategies
was the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, with its crowning mass slaughter at Srebrenica
(Chapter 8). To the Bosnian case we can add literally dozens of others in which gender
selectivity channeled, and significantly limited, the strictly murderous dimension of
the genocide (which is the critical one, by my preferred definition). They include
Bangladesh in 1971, Cambodia between 1975 and 1979, Kashmir/Punjab and Sri
Lanka in the 1980s and 1990s, the genocidal massacres of Sikhs in New Delhi in
1984, Saddam Hussein’s Anfal campaign against Iraqi Kurds in 1988, Kosovo and
East Timor in 1999, and Chechnya, continuing today.
11
In New Delhi, for example, where more than 5,000 Sikhs died in days of genocidal
massacres, the gendered targeting of males was carried to almost surreal extremes:
The nature of the attacks confirms that there was a deliberate plan to kill as many
Sikh men as possible, hence nothing was left to chance. That also explains why
in almost all cases, after hitting or stabbing, the victims were doused with kerosene
or petrol and burnt, so as to leave no possibility of their surviving. Between
October 31 and November 4, more than 2,500 men were murdered in different
GENDERING GENOCIDE
327
parts of Delhi, according to several careful unofficial estimates. There have been
very few cases of women being killed except when they got trapped in houses
which were set on fire. Almost all of the women interviewed described how men
and young boys were special targets. They were dragged out of the houses, attacked
with stones and rods, and set on fire....When women tried to protect the men
of their families, they were given a few blows and forcibly separated from the
men. Even when they clung to the men, trying to save them, they were hardly
ever attacked the way men were. I have not yet heard of a case of a woman being
assaulted and then burnt to death by the mob.
12
Delhi and, with it, Bangladesh, appear in Donald Horowitz’s compendium of “deadly
ethnic riots,” which are closely linked to genocide (see also Chapters 11–12).
Horowitz is emphatic about the gender dimension of such slaughters, and his
comments may be used without qualification to describe genocide as well:
While the violence proceeds, there is a strong, although not exclusive, concen-
tration on male victims of a particular ethnic identity. The elderly are often
left aside, and sometimes, though less frequently, so are children. Rapes certainly
occur in ethnic riots, sometimes a great many rapes, but the killing and mutilation
of men is much more common than is the murder or rape of women. Women
are sometimes pushed aside or forced to watch the torture and death of their
husbands and brothers....Sometimes women are even treated courteously by
their husbands’ killers.
13
It is important to point out that targeting “only” adult men is sufficient, under
international law, to constitute genocide. This was confirmed in April 2004, when
appeal judges of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia
(ICTY) overturned a 2001 verdict against Bosnian Serb General Radislav Krstic, who
had been found guilty “not of genocide but of aiding and abetting genocide” during
the Srebrenica massacre. The appeals chamber determined that “by seeking to
eliminate a part of the Bosnian Muslims” – those living in Srebrenica, and “the male
Muslim” component of that group – genocide had indeed occurred under Krstic’s
supervision.
14
In its way, the verdict was as significant as that rendered earlier by the
International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) against Jean-Paul Akayesu. This
established that the systematic rape of women could be considered genocidal when
part of a broader campaign of group destruction (see the discussion of genocidal rape,
below).
A very common result of gendercides against men is a glaring demographic
disparity in the proportion of surviving women versus men. This is exemplified by
cases such as northern Iraq, Cambodia, highlands Guatemala, and Rwanda –
although one must be careful in evaluating the extent to which data truly reflect
disproportionate male mortality, or alternatively an undercounting of males who may
be in exile (as refugees or fighters), or in hiding to escape persecution and evade
conscription.
15
In the “root-and-branch” holocausts that the general public tends to view as the
paradigm of genocide, a sequential progression is apparent along the lines described
GENDERING GENOCIDE
328
earlier. It is striking that all three of the “classic” genocides of the twentieth century
– by the Turks against the Armenians; the Nazis against the Jews; and Hutus against
Tutsis – followed roughly this pattern. The time separating the different stages was
sometimes brief (in the Nazi case, only a few weeks), and the Rwandan case cannot
be incorporated without serious qualification. Readers are invited to peruse the
chapter-length treatments of these genocides through a “gendered” lens, to see how
the progression from gendercidal to root-and-branch strategies occurred.
As noted in the Jewish Holocaust chapter, the shift from targeting “battle-age”
non-combatant males, usually viewed as legitimate targets, to targeting children,
women, and the elderly, may result in substantial emotional stress to killers. “While
unarmed men seem fair game,” wrote Leo Kuper, “the killing of women and children
arouses general revulsion”
16
– though not in all situations, and not necessarily for
long. Hence the escalation of Nazi killing of Jews, moving from adult males to other
population groups;
17
hence, too, the development of distancing technologies such
as gas vans and gas chambers, to reduce the trauma for murderers of women and
children. One can also note the degeneration of more centralized control over
genocidal killing in Rwanda. This appears to have been linked, in part, to concerns
of ordinary Hutus that the murder spree was moving beyond acceptable targets.
18
■
WOMEN AND GENOCIDE
The focus so far on the mass-murder component of genocide may have the
undesirable effect of implying that women are exempted from the worst genocidal
violence. Nothing could be further from the truth. First, root-and-branch genocides
throughout history have killed tens or hundreds of millions of females. Many
structural cases of genocide – such as mass famine, economic embargo, and so on –
impact equally or more severely upon women and girls than upon men and boys.
Second, the micro-managed gender strategies employed, for example, at
Srebrenica, are fairly rare, especially in the contemporary era of “degenerate war” (see
chapters 2, 12). It is more common, as it was even in the Balkans genocides, for
women to be exposed to direct abuses and atrocities. While these may be on average
less deadly, they are no less “gendered.” They range from verbal assault and humili-
ation, to physical attack and individual rape, to multiple and gang rape (often under
conditions of protracted sexual servitude), to rape-murder on a large scale.
In December 1937, one of the most savage instances of genocidal rape inaugurated
the so-called Rape of Nanjing. When Japanese forces seized the Chinese capital, up
to a quarter of a million Chinese men were corraled and massacred, often after torture.
Tens of thousands of women were also killed – usually after extended and excruciating
gang rape. Kenzo Okamoto, a Japanese soldier, recalled: “We were hungry for women!
Officers issued a rough rule: if you mess with a woman, kill her afterwards.”
19
Another
soldier stated: “Perhaps when we were raping [a female victim], we looked at her as
a woman, but when we killed her, we just thought of her as something like a pig.”
20
A Chinese eyewitness, Li Ke-hen, described “so many bodies on the street, victims
of group rape and murder. They were all stripped naked, their breasts cut off, leaving
a terrible dark brown hole; some of them were bayoneted in the abdomen, with their
GENDERING GENOCIDE
329
intestines spilling out alongside them; some had a roll of paper or a piece of wood
stuffed in their vaginas.” Almost no female was safe. Girls as young as 8, and elderly
women, were raped and killed. Even those not murdered immediately were liable
to be “turned loose in such a manhandled condition that they died a day or two
later.”
21
The Japanese rape of women in the Asian-occupied territories featured in the
indictment at the postwar Tokyo Tribunal – though the systematic conscription and
sexual exploitation of Korean, Indonesian, and other women (the so-called “comfort
women”)
22
was not addressed. This may be because the victorious powers had over-
seen somewhat similar systems of female exploitation in their own spheres. Likewise,
the mass rapes accompanying the Soviet conquest of eastern Germany in 1944–45
were not mentioned at the Nuremberg war crimes trials of 1945–46: the Soviets
would never have permitted it.
Feminist author Susan Brownmiller’s book Against Our Will (1975) marked the
first systematic exploration of rape. It publicized the large-scale sexual violence against
Bengali women during the Bangladesh genocide of 1971 (Box 8a), and the social
rejection that raped women confronted in the aftermath. It was the Balkans wars of
the 1990s, though, that exposed the issue of mass rape of women to international
visibility (see the account of 16-year-old “E.,” cited in Chapter 8). The term “geno-
cidal rape” began to be widely employed to convey the centrality of sexual assault to
the wider campaign of group destruction. Although rejected by some who argued that
rape and genocide were distinct crimes, the concept gained further credibility with
the horrific events in Rwanda in 1994. As the UN Special Rapporteur on Rwanda,
René Degni-Ségui, pointed out, “rape was the rule and its absence the exception”
during this genocide.
23
While estimates of women raped in the Balkans genocides
ranged between 20,000 and 50,000, in Rwanda they were ten times higher – between
250,000 and 500,000. Moreover, as at Nanjing, rape was standardly accompanied
by “extreme brutality” above and beyond the specifically sexual assault. “Rape accom-
panied by mutilation [was] reported to include: the pouring of boiling water onto
the genital parts and into the vagina...the cutting off of breast(s) and the mutilation
of other parts of the female body.”
24
And rape was very often followed by death –
sometimes (and still) years later, owing to the high proportion of Hutu rapists infected
with the HIV virus (see Chapter 9, pp. 246, for one woman’s story).
In part as a result of the scale and savagery of the Rwandan rapes, and reflecting
years of feminist-inspired mobilization around the issue, in September 1998 the
ICTR convicted Jean-Paul Akayesu for acts of genocide including sexual violence.
As Human Rights Watch noted, this marked “the first conviction for genocide by
an international court; the first time an international court has punished sexual
violence in a civil war; and the first time that rape was found to be an act of genocide
[intended] to destroy a group.”
25
■
GENDERCIDAL INSTITUTIONS
An appreciation of female vulnerability to genocide is greatly increased if we
expand our framing beyond politico–military genocides, to the realm of “gendercidal
GENDERING GENOCIDE
330
institutions.” I refer here to patterned behavior, embedded in human societies,
that exacts a death-toll sufficiently large in scale and systematic in character to be
considered gendercidal.
For females, probably the most destructive such institution throughout history
is female infanticide and neonaticide. The selective killing of newborn and infant
girls reflects a culturally ingrained preference for male children. A nineteenth-century
missionary in China, for example, “interviewed 40 women over age 50 who reported
having borne 183 sons and 175 daughters, of whom 126 sons but only 53 daugh-
ters survived to age 10; by their account, the women had destroyed 78 of their
daughters.”
26
The Communist Revolution of 1949 made great strides in reducing
discrimination against women and infant girls, but such millennia-old traditions are
extremely difficult to root out. Today, numerous reports speak of large demographic
disparities between males and females in parts of rural China, leading to widespread
trafficking in women and adolescent girls as Chinese men seek to import wives from
outside their regions.
The country where female infanticide and neonaticide are most widespread at
present is India. For example, a study of Tamil Nadu state by the Community Service
Guild of Madras found that “female infanticide is rampant” among Hindu families:
“Of the 1,250 families covered by the study, 740 had only one girl child and 249
agreed directly that they had done away with the unwanted girl child. More than
213 of the families had more than one male child whereas half the respondents had
only one daughter.”
27
Among wealthier families in both India and China, however,
infanticide is being replaced by sex-selective abortion, following in utero screening
procedures that have spread even to isolated rural areas.
Among other gendercidal institutions targeting females, we can cite gendered
deficiencies in nutrition and health care (reflecting the prioritizing of male family
members for these resources); “honor” killings of women and girls, particularly in
the Middle East, South Asia, and the Caucasus; and dowry killings and sati in India,
the former referring to murders of young women whose families cannot provide
sufficient dowry payments to the family of their designated spouse, while the latter
institution consigns women to die on the funeral pyres of their husbands.
Gendercidal institutions have also targeted males throughout history, and exacted
a vast death-toll. Military conscription is an outstanding example. Less widely
known is corvée (forced) labor, which is both intimately related to and analytically
distinct from military conscription. Corvée has overwhelmingly targeted adult men
throughout history, killing in all likelihood hundreds of millions. There are grounds,
in fact, for considering corvée to be the most destructive of all human institutions,
even outpacing war. Ironically, forced labor remains legal today under the relevant
international convention – but only when its targets are able-bodied adult males
between the ages of 18 and 45.
28
■
GENOCIDE AND VIOLENCE AGAINST HOMOSEXUALS
The phenomenon of discrimination and violence against homosexuals – especially
gay men – is still pervasive. It is linked to the collective policing of gender, in which
GENDERING GENOCIDE
331
those who opt out of heterosexuality are seen as “asocial” threats. In the Nazi case
(Box 6a), gay males were viewed as violating eugenic tenets. While the mentally
handicapped were “useless eaters,” gays were condemned as superfluous for their
“failure” to help replenish the Völk.
Perhaps only in the Nazi case has violence against homosexual men attained a scale
and systematic character that might be considered genocidal. Still, a glance around
today’s world shows the many ways that violence against gays exists along the
genocidal continuum proposed by Nancy Scheper-Hughes (Chapter 11). For
example, gay males – especially male prostitutes, the transgendered, and drag queens
– are at extraordinary risk of vigilante-style killings in some Latin American societies.
In Colombia between 1986 and 1990, “328 gay men were murdered in the city of
Medellín alone.”
29
More generally, Amnesty International reports, sampled by
Stefanie Rixecker, demonstrate that a wide range of violence is “directed at queer
individuals based upon their actual or perceived sexual preference”:
The types of abuses range from complaints of ill treatment while in police custody
to rape, sexual abuse, sexual realignment surgery, extrajudicial executions and
disappearances, and state-sanctioned execution. The murder of gays and lesbians
due to their sexuality, or to associated behaviors and illnesses (e.g. HIV and AIDS),
not only means that the individuals are targeted, but also – due to the relatively
small numbers of gays and lesbians – becomes tantamount to genocide and now,
more specifically, gendercide. Although a full complement of the gay community
is not murdered in such acts, the relatively small statistical populations of gays
and lesbians overall means that the annual toll of queer identities can be regarded
as a genocidal act.
30
A further connection may be drawn between the targeting of homosexuals and the
specific strategies of torture, mutilation, and murder employed in most genocides.
Both women and men are liable to be attacked in ways that violate and annihilate
their normal sexual roles: women through genocidal rape, genital mutilation, ripping
of fetuses from wombs; men by similar strategies of genital mutilation, sexual torture,
and genocidal rape.
31
In cases of male-on-male rape, it is generally only the victim
that is rendered “feminine” and imputedly homosexual. The male rapist preserves
his safe heterosexual identification and, in perverse fashion, may even bolster it
through sexual violation of another man.
■
ARE MEN MORE GENOCIDAL THAN WOMEN?
The most cursory examination of classical and contemporary genocides shows
that the overwhelming majority of genocidal planners, killers, and rapists are men,
just as men predominate as architects and wagers of war. There is also the lesser, but
still striking, disproportion of men among murderers worldwide (especially mass
and serial murderers). One wonders, in fact, whether for many people, a sufficient
explanation of genocide (and war, and murder) would not be simply: “Boys will be
boys.” Likewise, when we focus on disproportionate male victimization, at least for
GENDERING GENOCIDE
332
genocide’s most lethal strategies, patterns of intra-male competition and conquest
seem significant. They are evident not only in most human societies, as anthro-
pologists have shown, but among the higher primates that are humanity’s closest
relatives.
32
Explanations for these tendencies and uniformities have spawned enduring,
interdisciplinary, and so far inconclusive debates. There is no space to deal with these
in detail here; I offer only a few observations.
33
First, male dominance among killers’ ranks is the result of global patriarchy – “rule
by the fathers,” that is, rule by men as heads of family units and by older and more
powerful men within communities, rather than rule by men as an undifferentiated
gender class. It is usually the patriarchs who decide to wage war and genocide. To
this end, they must mobilize younger, subordinate males to inflict the actual violence.
In addition, they, assisted by women as mothers and nurturers, must educate, train,
and prepare younger generations of males to serve as soldiers, génocidaires, and
cannon-fodder. This rite of passage qualifies them, if they survive, to join patriarchal
ranks.
Men must thus be shaped and often coerced to perform violent tasks. The long,
little-studied history of masculine resistance to military conscription, and the
brutality of the “basic training” to which conscripts are generally exposed, suggest that
a more peaceable disposition must be broken down and reconstructed for warlike or
genocidal purposes.
A second question then presents itself: What happens when women are similarly
mobilized, forced, encouraged, allowed to participate in genocide and other violence?
Readers’ minds might leap to the revelations from Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad,
where female guards were prominent as agents of abuse. The scholar of genocide,
moreover, encounters the direct involvement of women at many points in history:
torturing and executing prisoners-of-war (as was standard in Native American
civilizations); joining men in attacking and pillaging refugee convoys (as Kurdish
women did in the Armenian genocide); and actively involving themselves in
“euthanasia” killings and concentration-camp atrocities under the Nazis (female camp
guards “murdered as easily [as men]; their sadism was no less,” notes James Waller).
34
This does not reckon with more diffuse and indirect forms of participation: providing
moral and material support to male combatants and génocidaires; ostracizing males
who seek to evade involvement in slaughter;
35
and providing political support,
sometimes exceeding that of men, for violent and dictatorial leaders.
36
There is, finally, a “Rwanda test” to apply to female participation in genocide.
In the holocaust of 1994, Hutu women, uniquely in recorded history, were mobilized
en masse as participants in genocide. “I had seen war before, but I had never seen a
woman carrying a baby on her back kill another woman with a baby on her back,”
said a stunned officer with the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda
(UNAMIR).
37
Women also assumed leadership positions at national, regional, and
local levels – as with Pauline Nyiramasuhuko, indicted by the International Criminal
Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) for “personally direct[ing] squads of Hutu men to
torture and butcher Tutsi men, and to rape and mutilate Tutsi women.”
38
In light
of this evidence, it may be that “the challenge for future research is to transcend our
gendered expectations that women are basically innocent by nature, so that their acts
GENDERING GENOCIDE
333
of cruelty are viewed as deviant and abnormal, and approach their perpetration of
extraordinary evil the same way we have men – as ordinary people influenced by
dispositional, situational, and environmental factors.”
39
■
A NOTE ON GENDERED PROPAGANDA
A useful application of a gender perspective in genocide studies is to genocidal
propaganda, so central in mobilizing populations to support and commit atrocities.
This issue may be approached from various angles.
If men, overwhelmingly, must be mobilized to do the “dirty work” of genocidal
killing, how are their gender sensibilities exploited? Perhaps the most common
strategy is to accuse males who evince qualms about participation of being cowards
– failed bearers of masculinity. A Rwandan official visiting a commune that was
deemed “negligent” in its genocidal duties demanded to know “if there were no more
men there, meaning men who could deal with ‘security’ problems.”
40
Men who
“shirked” their duties were denounced in terms little less venomous than those
employed against Tutsis: “What are those sons of dogs fleeing from?”
41
Men’s designated role as “protectors” of women and children fuels potent pro-
paganda strategies. Nazi troops dispatched to the fire-storm of the eastern front were
exposed to speeches from their commanders, demanding to know “what would have
happened had these Asiatic Mongol hordes succeeded to pour into...Germany,
laying the country waste, plundering, murdering, raping?”
42
By implication, the
German troops were justified in laying waste, plundering, murdering, and raping,
as they did to an extent unseen since the days of the “Mongol hordes.”
Women are generally cast in supporting roles in genocidal campaigns. Propaganda
directed at them emphasizes their role as guardians of home and children. This has
the added advantage of bolstering the self-image of males as protectors of (passive,
defenseless) “womenandchildren.”
A further important aspect of genocidal propaganda is the demonization of
out-group men as a prelude to gender-selective round-ups and mass killing. The
classic case is the construction of the “Eternal Jew” in Nazi propaganda, which paved
the way for the Holocaust of 1941–45. This propaganda entrenched an image of the
“wretched, disgusting, horrifying, flat-footed, hook-nosed dirty Jew”
43
– virtually
always a male Jew. As Joan Ringelheim notes: “Legitimation for targeting Jewish men
was plentiful in Nazi anti-Semitic and racist propaganda and, more to the point, in
Nazi policy. The decision to kill every Jew did not seem to demand special justification
to kill Jewish men. They were already identified as dangerous,” thanks to years of
grotesque imagery such as that depicted in Figure 13.1. “This was not so for Jewish
women and children.”
44
It comes as little surprise, then, that adult male Jews were
the first to be rounded up and executed en masse on the eastern front, as a means of
acclimatizing the killers to subsequent root-and-branch genocide.
In a similar vein, consider the language typically directed at population groups to
mark them out for persecution or genocide: terms such as “monster,” “beast/bestial,”
“devil/demon,” “bandit,” “criminal,” “rapist,” “terrorist,” “swindler,” “vagabond,”
“subhuman,” “vermin,” “exploiter”....Now, though the task be unpleasant, assign
GENDERING GENOCIDE
334
Figure 13.1 Poster for the Nazi propaganda exhibition
Der Ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew), 1937. The sinister-
looking male Jew is shown as addicted to lucre (the coins in
his outstretched hand), oppressive (the whip in the other),
and allied with international communism (Germany with
the hammer-and-sickle crooked under his arm). Depictions
of out-group males as dangerous and malevolent are central
to both genocidal propaganda and gendercidal massacre.
Source: Hoover Institution Archives Poster Collection.
Figure 13.2 “General Dallaire and his army have fallen into the trap of fatal women.” Tutsi women, with badges/tattoos of
support for the FPR (Rwandan rebel forces), are depicted seducing UN force commander Gen. Roméo Dallaire in this
cartoon from the Hutu Power propaganda paper Kangura (February 1994). Genocidal propaganda against women often
emphasizes their imputed sexual powers; in the Rwandan case, this paved the way for massive sexual violence against Tutsi
women during the 1994 genocide.
Source: From Christopher Taylor, Sacrifice as Terror: The Rwandan Genocide of 1994 (Oxford: Berg, 1994).
a human face to these caricatures. Is it a male or a female face that automatically
leaps to mind?
45
When women are targeted in genocidal and proto-genocidal propaganda, this
tends to occur (1) on a lesser scale, (2) with a lesser variety of imagery, and (3) with
a heavy concentration on the female’s imputed sexual power (including her
reproductive capacity) (Figure 13.2). Hence the regular use of terms such as “seducer,”
“prostitute,” “whore,” “baby factory.” This emphasis on sexual power and capacity no
doubt fuels the rampant sexual violence against women and girls, including extreme
humiliation and savage mutilation, that is a standard feature of genocidal campaigns.
Women, and men, may also be targeted for their supposed links to the supernatural
(“witch” and, relatedly, “baby-killer”).
The implicit gendering of much genocidal propaganda seems fundamental to
marshaling support for gendercide and all-out genocide. As such, it would seem to
have implications for strategies of genocide prevention. I return to this subject in the
book’s concluding chapter.
■
FURTHER STUDY
African Rights, Rwanda: Not So Innocent: When Women Become Killers. London:
African Rights, 1995. Taboo-shattering account of women’s participation in the
1994 genocide.
Gendercide Watch, www.gendercide.org. Educational website featuring two dozen
detailed case studies of gendercide.
Michael P. Ghiglieri, The Dark Side of Man: Tracing the Origins of Male Violence.
Cambridge, MA: Perseus Books, 2000. Argues that men are biologically
programmed to wage war and commit genocide.
Joshua S. Goldstein, War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and
Vice Versa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Wide-ranging inter-
disciplinary overview.
Human Rights Watch, Shattered Lives: Sexual Violence During the Rwanda Genocide
and Its Aftermath. New York: Human Rights Watch, 1996. Examines the
targeting of women for rape in the Rwandan holocaust; available on the Web at
http://hrw.org/reports/1996/Rwanda.htm.
Adam Jones, ed., Gendercide and Genocide. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University
Press, 2004. The most wide-ranging book on gender-selective killing.
Claudia Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family and Nazi Politics.New
York: Basic Books, 1987. Intensive inquiry into the diverse roles of German
women under Nazism.
Rohit Lentin, ed., Gender and Catastrophe. London: Zed Books, 1997. Essays on
the gendering of genocide, slavery, poverty, and famine, with an emphasis on
women.
Lois Ann Lorentzen and Jennifer Turpin, eds, The Women and War Reader.New York:
New York University Press, 1998. Solid anthology of writings on women’s
victimization and agency in wartime.
Caroline O.N. Moser and Fiona C. Clark, eds, Victims, Perpetrators or Actors? Gender,
GENDERING GENOCIDE
336
Armed Conflict and Political Violence. London: Zed Books 2001. Ground-
breaking edited collection.
Elenor Richter-Lyonette, ed., In the Aftermath of Rape: Women’s Rights, War Crimes,
and Genocide. Givrins: Coordination of Women’s Advocacy, 1997. Examines
genocidal rape, with emphasis on the Balkans and Rwandan cases.
Alexandra Stiglmayer, ed., Mass Rape: The War against Women in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1995. The standard source on sexual
violence against women in the Balkans wars.
Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, Volume 1: Women, Floods, Bodies, History, trans.
Stephen Conway. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
Profound psychoanalytical study of fascism and masculinity.
Mary Anne Warren, Gendercide: The Implications of Sex Selection. Totowa, NJ:
Rowman & Allanheld, 1985. Coined the term “gendercide,” though with a focus
on reproductive technologies.
■
NOTES
1 See, e.g., R. Charli Carpenter, “Beyond ‘Gendercide’: Operationalizing Gender in
Comparative Genocide Studies,” in Adam Jones, ed., Gendercide and Genocide (Nashville,
TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2004), pp. 230–56, esp. pp. 232–38.
2 Joshua Goldstein, War and Gender (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p.
2.
3 For instance, Mary E. Hawkesworth writes: “In principle, a gendered practice could
privilege men or women. But the history of male dominance has resulted in systematic
male power advantages across diverse social domains. Feminist usage of the adjective
‘gendered’ reflects this male power advantage. Hence a gendered practice is synonymous with
androcentric [male-centered] practice in common feminist terminology.” Hawkesworth,
“Democratization: Reflections on Gendered Dislocations in the Public Sphere,” in R.M.
Kelly et al., eds, Gender, Globalization, and Democratization (Lanham, MD: Rowman &
Littlefield), p. 235, n. 2; emphasis added.
4 See the excerpts in Kurt A. Raaflaub, hand-out for Brown University Classics course
(CL56), “War and Society in the Ancient World,” http://www.brown.edu/Departments/
Classics/CL56/CL56_HO1.html.
5 Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, quoted in Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn,
The History and Sociology of Genocide: Analyses and Case Studies (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1990), p. 73.
6 See Adam Jones, “Why Gendercide? Why Root-and-Branch? A Comparison of the
Vendée Uprising of 1793–94 and the Bosnian War of the 1990s,” Journal of Genocide
Research, 8: 1 (2006), pp. 9–25.
7 A disturbing strand of just-war theory even justifies gender-selective extermination
of males. The Enlightenment philosopher Vitoria stated: “Everyone able to bear arms
should be considered dangerous . . . they may therefore be killed unless the opposite is
clearly true.” Michael Walzer wrote: “a soldier who, once he is engaged, simply fires at
every male villager between the age of 15 and 50...is probably justified in doing so.”
Vitoria quoted in R. Charli Carpenter, “‘Women and Children First’: Gender, Norms,
and Humanitarian Evacuation in the Balkans 1991–95,” International Organization,
57: 4 (fall 2003), p. 672; Walzer quoted in Carpenter, “Beyond ‘Gendercide,’” p. 252,
n. 13.
8 Donald L. Horowitz, The Deadly Ethnic Riot (Berkeley, CA: University of California
Press, 2001), p. 148. Horowitz adds that “In experiments, males are also more selective
GENDERING GENOCIDE
337
in their choice of targets; females distribute shocks more equally among targets. Perhaps
selective targeting itself is a sex-skewed phenomenon”; that is, males are more likely to
aggress against males selectively and disproportionately than are women (p. 148).
9 See Adam Jones, “Gender and Genocide in Rwanda,” in Jones, ed., Gendercide and
Genocide, p. 111.
10 See R. Charli Carpenter, “‘Women, Children and Other Vulnerable Groups’: Gender,
Strategic Frames and the Protection of Civilians as a Transnational Issue,” International
Studies Quarterly, 49 (2005), pp. 295–334.
11 Most of these cases receive extended treatment on the Gendercide Watch site,
http://www.gendercide.org. A question commonly asked is whether in such cases, men
are being targeted “as a group” or “as such,” rather than (for example) as combatants or
potential combatants. The question is a valid one, in part because it is the case that gender
always combines with other variables to produce genocidal outcomes. The most obvious
are ethnicity/nationality/race/religion/perceived political affiliation (that is, there is no
targeting of males as a global gender group, but rather of males belonging to one of these
designated groups); age (with “battle-age” males more liable to be targeted than very
young or very old ones); community prominence (the disproportionate representation of
men among elites means that when “eliticides” occur, as in Burundi in 1972, the victims
are overwhelmingly male); and perceived military capacity (given the prevailing cultural
and practical identification of males with combatants). Often implicit in the question,
however, is the notion that women and girls are victimized “as such” – primarily because
they are female. In my view, this is untenable. When women are the victims of politico–
military genocide, it is similarly on the basis of their ethnicity, perceived political
affiliation, and so on (or because of their family relationship with men of these designated
groups). The Nazis who killed Jewish women en masse did not kill German women – in
fact, their slaughter of the Jews was often justified by the supposed need to protect
German women. Even in the cases where a misogynistic worldview seems predominant,
other variables are crucial. Female infanticide does not target females as a group, but
rather those of a particular age, and usually of a particular (poorer) social class. The
European witch-hunts of the medieval and early modern era, which resulted in a death-
toll about 75 percent female, likewise did not designate all women as targets, but women
perceived as a threat for their supposed liaisons with dark powers. Age and marital status
were other important variables, with the majority of women designated as “witches” being
older and more likely to be widows. Clearly, however, the gender variable is decisive in
all these cases – as it is in the case of gendercidal killings of men. Finally, does the
gendered hatred of women – misogyny – that factors in all these cases have a counterpart
for male victims (misandry)? I contend that it does, and that it is evident, for example, in
gendered propaganda. For further discussion, see Adam Jones, “Problems of Gendercide,”
in Jones, ed., Gendercide and Genocide, pp. 257–71.
12 Madhu Kishwar, “Delhi: Gangster Rule,” in Patwant Singh and Harji Malik, eds, Punjab:
The Fatal Miscalculation (New Delhi: Patwant Singh, 1985), pp. 171–78.
13 Horowitz, The Deadly Ethnic Riot, pp. 73, 123, n. 261.
14 Ian Traynor, “Hague Rules Srebrenica was Genocide,” Guardian, April 20, 2004.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,1195429,00.html. See also the
comments by Daniel Goldhagen concerning the Nazis’ early gendercidal massacres of
Jewish males on the Eastern front: “Even if . . . the initial order was to kill ‘only’ teenage
and adult Jewish males – the order was still genocidal and clearly was understood by
the perpetrators as such. . . . The killing of the adult males of a community is nothing
less than the destruction of that community.” Daniel J. Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing
Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Vintage, 1997), p. 153.
15 See, e.g., the discussion of the Rwandan case in Jones, “Gender and Genocide in
Rwanda,” pp. 123–25; and of the Cambodian case in May Ebihara and Judy
Ledgerwood, “Aftermaths of Genocide: Cambodian Villagers,” in Alexander Laban
Hinton, ed., Annihilating Difference: The Anthropology of Genocide (Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 2002), pp. 275–80.
GENDERING GENOCIDE
338
16 Leo Kuper, Genocide: Its Political Use in the Twentieth Century (London: Penguin,
1981), p. 46. Richard Rhodes also notes that “Men prepared to kill victims who are
manifestly unthreatening – the elderly, unarmed women, small children, infants – behave
differently from men prepared to kill victims such as men of military age who can
be construed to be at least potentially dangerous.” Rhodes, Masters of Death: The
SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002),
p. 69. According to Rhodes (p. 167), the Nazis even “established mental hospitals and
rest areas” to care for SS men “‘who [had] broken down while executing women and
children.’”
17 See the analysis of this escalation in Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, pp. 149–51.
18 On this phenomenon, see Jones, ed., Gendercide and Genocide, pp. 24–25, 117–18.
19 James Yin and Shi Young, The Rape of Nanking: An Undeniable History in Photographs
(Chicago, IL: Triumph, 1996), p. 188.
20 Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War Two (London:
Penguin, 1998), pp. 49–50.
21 Historian David Bergamini, quoted in Yin and Young, The Rape of Nanking, p. 195.
22 Following the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931, the Japanese army began to
construct a network of hundreds of “comfort stations” across the occupied territories,
“dup[ing] or forc[ing] Korean, Taiwanese, Chinese, Indonesian, Filipino, Japanese and
Dutch women to work in them.” Estimates of the number seized and exploited in this
fashion range between 140,000 and 200,000. The “comfort women” experienced
treatment that “was almost universally barbaric. They were forced to have sex with
as many as 50 men a day, some were tied to beds with their legs open, and many were
beaten by drunken soldiers.” See Velisarios Kattoulas, “No Comfort for the Women,”
Far Eastern Economic Review, March 15, 2001. According to George Hicks, “The comfort
system consisted of the legalised military rape of subject women on a scale – and over
a period of time – previously unknown in history.” Hicks, The Comfort Women:
Japan’s Brutal Regime of Enforced Prostitution in the Second World War (New York:
W.W. Norton, 1994), pp. 16–17. Relatively few “comfort women” died as a direct
result of Japanese mistreatment; most fatalities resulted from disease, or from Allied
bombardments. Nonetheless, the death rate was high: about one in every six “comfort
women” died during their period of servitude, according to Hicks. Those who survived
faced continued shame and suffering upon their return home, and “for the most part kept
silent about their experiences” until recent times, when they began to seek compensation
for their suffering from the Japanese government (Hicks, The Comfort Women,
pp. 164–65).
23 Quoted in Elenor Richter-Lyonette, “Women after the Genocide in Rwanda,” in Richter-
Lyonette, ed., In the Aftermath of Rape: Women’s Rights, War Crimes, and Genocide
(Givrins: Coordination of Women’s Advocacy, 1997), p. 107.
24 Richter-Lyonette, “Women after the Genocide,” p. 107.
25 “Human Rights Watch Applauds Rwanda Rape Verdict,” Human Rights Watch press
release, September 2, 1998, http://www.hrw.org/press98/sept/rrape902.htm; emphasis
added. See also Teaching Human Rights Online, “Rape and Genocide in Rwanda: The
ICTR’s Akayesu Verdict,” http://homepages.uc.edu/thro/rwanda/RwandaRapeCase2.
htm.
26 Ansley J. Coale and Judith Banister, “Five Decades of Missing Females in China,”
Demography, 31: 3 (August 1994), p. 472.
27 Malavika Karlekar, “The Girl Child in India: Does She Have Any Rights?,” Canadian
Woman Studies, March 1995.
28 For detailed case studies of gendercidal institutions against females and males, see the
Gendercide Watch website.
29 Amnesty International UK report, Breaking the Silence, cited in Stefanie Rixecker,
“Genetic Engineering and Queer Biotechnology: The Eugenics of the Twenty-first
Century?,” in Jones, ed., Gendercide and Genocide, p. 188. See also media and human
rights reportage on persecution and prosecutions of gay men in Egypt, e.g., Josh
GENDERING GENOCIDE
339
Hammer, “One Man’s Tale,” Newsweek, February 16, 2002; “Egypt: Crackdown on
Homosexual Men Continues,” Human Rights Watch press release, 7 October 2003.
http://hrw.org/press/2003/10/egypt100703.htm.
30 Rixecker, “Genetic Engineering and Queer Biotechnology,” p. 188.
31 Men raped and sexually tortured in detention received no such attention. For discussion
of the phenomenon, focusing on the Balkans case, see Augusta Del Zotto and Adam Jones,
“Male-on-Male Sexual Violence in Wartime: Human Rights’ Last Taboo?,” paper
presented to the Annual Convention of the International Studies Association (ISA),
New Orleans, LA, March 23–27, 2002, available at http://adamjones.freeservers.
com/ malerape.htm; and related observations in Adam Jones, “Straight as a Rule:
Heteronormativity, Gendercide, and the Non-combatant Male,” Men and Masculinities,
forthcoming (2006).
32 For an argument along these lines, see Michael P. Ghiglieri, The Dark Side of Man:
Tracing the Origins of Male Violence (Cambridge, MA: Perseus Books, 2000). Ghiglieri
draws on studies of chimpanzee behavior, as well as psychological experiments, to support
his assertion that “men are born ethnocentric and xenophobic by nature. Men bond along
kin lines and/or via reciprocal altruisim to fight and kill other men genetically more
distant from them in genocidal wars aimed at seizing or usurping what those other men
possess, including the reproductive potential of their women” (p. 215).
33 The best and most readable overview of the debates, drawing on the hard-scientific as well
as social-scientific literatures, is Goldstein, War and Gender, chs 3–4.
34 James Waller, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 300, n. 12.
35 “In Britain and America during [the] war, women organized a large-scale campaign to
hand out white feathers to able-bodied men found on the streets, to shame the men for
failing to serve in combat....The white feather campaign was briefly resurrected in
World War II, and the British government had to issue badges for men exempt on
medical grounds.” Goldstein, War and Gender, p. 272. “Many feminists, such as
England’s Isabella Pankurst, set the struggle for suffrage aside for an equally militant
jingoism, and contented themselves with organizing women to support the war effort.
‘The war is so horribly exciting but I cannot live on it,’ one British suffragette wrote. ‘It
is like being drunk all day.’” Barbara Ehrenreich, Blood Rites: Origins and History of the
Passions of War (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1997), p. 13.
36 It seems that at least as many women as men, perhaps more, supported Hitler and the Nazi
regime; Tim Mason writes that “a variety of different sources convey the impression
that in the later 1930s the Third Reich enjoyed a large measure of active and passive
support among women, a larger measure than it gained from among men” (quoted in Robert
Gellately, Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany [Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2001], p. 16). Gellately explains this as follows: “Conservative, Catholic,
and even liberal women by and large shared the point of view advocated by the Nazis, as
to a ‘naturally’ determined sexual division of labour, and that it was important to
reconstruct a ‘community of the people’ in which they would be involved primarily as
wives and mothers, and ‘not be forced to compete with men for scarce jobs and political
influence’” (p. 10, citing Ute Frevert, Women in German History). Owing to gender-
separated voting booths, we also know that more women than men voted in favor of
perpetuating Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorial rule in Chile in a 1989 plebiscite; “51% of
women and 58% of men voted ‘no’” to the dictator. (See the fine documentary, In
Women’s Hands, PBS/Annenberg Project, Americas series, 1993; statistic available at
http://www.rit.edu/~cakgss/inwomenshands.html.) In both cases, one wonders whether
the fact that it was overwhelmingly men who were targeted for harassment, detention,
incarceration, torture, and murder by the regimes in question (the Jewish Holocaust apart)
may have prompted a greater proportion of men to express opposition to those regimes
when it was safe to do so. Finally, the recent prominence of women in the proto-genocidal
Hindu-extremist movement in India has received increasing scholarly attention: see Parita
Mukta’s fascinating treatment, “Gender, Community and Nation,” in Susie Jacobs et al.,
GENDERING GENOCIDE
340
eds, States of Conflict: Gender, Violence and Resistance (London: Zed Books, 2000),
pp. 163–78.
37 Quoted in Alison Des Forges, Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda (New
York: Human Rights Watch, 1999), p. 261. For numerous examples, see the ground-
breaking African Rights report, Rwanda: Not So Innocent: When Women Become Killers
(London: African Rights, 1995).
38 Kimberlee Acquaro and Peter Landesman, “Out of Madness, A Matriarchy,” Mother
Jones, January/February 2003. Available at http://www.motherjones.com/news/featurex/
2003/01/ma_spc_01.html. The article is a good overview of women’s position in Rwanda
after the genocide, including the “unplanned – if not inadvertent – movement of female
empowerment driven by national necessity.” The trial of Nyiramasuhuko was ongoing at
the time of writing (September 2005).
39 Waller, Becoming Evil, p. 301, n. 12.
40 Quoted in Des Forges, Leave None to Tell the Story, p. 459.
41 Quoted in African Rights, Rwanda: Death, Despair and Defiance (rev. edn) (London:
African Rights, 1995), p. 82.
42 Commander of the Wehrmacht’s II Corps to his troops, late December 1941; quoted in
Omer Bartov, Hitler’s Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 132.
43 Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, Volume 1: The Years of Persecution,
1933–1939 (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), p. 124.
44 Joan Ringelheim, “Genocide and Gender: A Split Memory,” in Ronit Lentin, ed., Gender
and Catastrophe (London: Zed Books, 1997), p. 19. See also the heavily gendered
depiction of the Jew in Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin,
1943), pp. 300–27.
45 See the discussion in Adam Jones, “Genocide and Humanitarian Intervention:
Incorporating the Gender Variable,” Journal of Humanitarian Assistance, February 2002,
http://www.jha.ac/articles/a080.htm.
GENDERING GENOCIDE
341
PART 4 THE FUTURE OF GENOCIDE
■
Memory, Forgetting,
and Denial
Memory is life. It is always carried by groups of living people, and therefore it is in
permanent evolution. It is subject to the dialectics of remembering and forgetting,
unaware of its successive deformations, open to all kinds of use and manipulation.
. . . Memory always belongs to our time and forms a lived bond with the eternal present.
Pierre Nora
■
THE STRUGGLE OVER HISTORICAL MEMORY
“You speak about history,” Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin told a gathering of his
subordinates. “But one must sometimes correct history.”
1
Never was that task pursued
with more surreal dedication than under Stalin. Old photographs were doctored to
eliminate Stalin’s former Bolshevik colleagues, now labeled “saboteurs” and “enemies
of the people” (see Chapter 5). The history of the Communist Party was rewritten
to accord Stalin a central and heroic role. Inconvenient evidence was expunged, such
as Lenin’s warning shortly before his death that Stalin should be distrusted and
marginalized. When the Nazi–Soviet pact was signed in August 1939, the erstwhile
epitome of evil – the fascist German regime – became a friend and business partner.
Less than two years later, Germany had launched the most destructive invasion of
all time against the Soviet Union. Overnight, the Soviet people and official history
had to shift again to accommodate total war against the former friend (and, before
that, enemy).
345
CHAPTER 14
As satirized by George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four, Stalinism and other totali-
tarianisms have become classic cases of the manipulation of history and memory.
Usually, however, things are not as clear-cut as dictatorial imposition. Rather, memory
and history reflect an ongoing contestation and evolution, within both societies and
individual hearts and minds.
To appreciate better the contested terrain that is human memory, consider the
country where much of this book was written: Argentina. In 1976, against a backdrop
of mounting social and economic chaos, a military regime under General Jorge Rafael
Videla took power. A state of siege was declared. For the next seven years, Videla and
his fellow generals presided over the most brutal of South America’s modern military
dictatorships. Between 10,000 and 30,000 people – suspected of involvement with
leftist guerrillas, or of vaguer subversions – were “disappeared” by the authorities.
Generally, they were tortured to death or executed; many of the bodies were dumped
out of airplanes and into the Atlantic Ocean off the Argentine coast. Pregnant
detainees were often allowed to give birth before being killed; the infants were then
turned over to be adopted by military families.
2
In 1982, following Argentina’s defeat by Great Britain in the war over the Falkland
Islands,
3
military rule began to crumble. In 1983, the state of siege was abrogated,
and free elections were held. Raúl Alfonsín of the Radical Civic Union (UCR) was
sworn in as president in December. That month also saw the creation of the National
Commission on Disappeared People (CONADEP), which investigated the fate of
those who vanished under the military regime. Its report was released in 1984 under
the title Nunca Más (Never Again) – echoing the call of those who memorialize the
Jewish Holocaust. The report “catalogued 8,960 unresolved ‘disappearances,’ but
warned that the true figure might be higher. It also listed 340 clandestine abduction
centres in Argentina, which it said were in use at the height of the repression.”
4
In
Argentina, the events are regularly referred to as “genocide,” although this designation
would be disputed by many genocide scholars.
5
Of the state detention facilities, the most notorious was the Naval Mechanics
School in the Palermo suburb of Buenos Aires (see Figure 14.1). Over time, the
movement to memorialize the disappeared and compensate survivors began to push
for the creation of a museum on the forty-two-acre property. In 2004, the government
of Nelson Kirchner bowed to the pressure. It expropriated the site and declared it
would house a “Museum of Memory,” to educate current and future generations
about the period of state terror.
But what memories, and whose, should be reflected? Was this form of memori-
alization even appropriate, with the atrocities still fresh in the national consciousness?
An account by journalist Larry Rohter in the New York Times described “sharp
differences” over these issues among human-rights activists.
6
The Mothers of the Plaza
de Mayo had gathered throughout the military dictatorship in the central square
of Buenos Aires, demanding information and the return of disappeared loved ones.
Some members of the group argued that “museums mark the end of a story, and we
haven’t reached that point in Argentina yet,” in the words of one leader, Hebe de
Bonafini. “It’s much too soon to be setting up a museum, because the historical events
in question are too recent.” Other organizations, however, strongly supported the
project. One, called Memoria Abierta (Open Memory), set to work compiling an
MEMORY, FORGETTING, DENIAL
346
archive of over 4,000 photographs and a range of oral histories for deposit in
the museum. According to Patricia Valdez, director of Memoria Abierta: “We do
not want this museum for ourselves, but for Argentine society. It has to be a place
that transcends the fluctuations of Argentine politics and lets the facts speak for
themselves.”
Even among those who generally supported the initiative, the appropriate range
and limits of this “memory space” (espacio para la memoria) aroused controversy. In
announcing the museum’s creation on March 24, 2004, the anniversary of the 1976
coup d’état, President Kirchner “seemed to be suggesting that the focus will be on the
military dictatorship that dominated the country from 1976 to 1983.” Kirchner was
leader of the Peronist Party, whose activists had been targeted in the so-called “Dirty
War.” But Peronism, too, stood accused of substantial atrocities during the 1970s.
They included the formation of paramilitary organizations and death squads blamed
for some 300 murders, as well as bombings and kidnappings. Limiting the museum’s
MEMORY, FORGETTING, DENIAL
347
Figure 14.1 The Naval Mechanics School in the Buenos Aires suburb of Palermo, Argentina, where hundreds of victims of
the country’s “Dirty War” (1976–83) were interned, tortured, and murdered by the military dictatorship. Today, as the banner
hanging between the pillars proclaims, it is being turned into a “Memory Space” (Espacio para la Memoria). But for whose
memory?
Source: Author’s photo, 2005.
coverage to the 1976–83 period “would only distort historical realities,” argued the
Peronists’ opponents.
Then there were the military leaders. Some had been tried and jailed after the
return of democracy. After a series of “demonstration coups” by disgruntled military
officers, in 1985 President Alfonsín declared a punto final (full stop) to the prose-
cutions. Those already jailed were pardoned by his Peronist successor, Carlos Menem,
who declared he was acting in the interests of national unity and reconciliation.
7
Predictably, some in the military rejected the museum initiative, opining (in
the words of one senior officer) that it marked “not a closure or a healing of a
wound, but the opening of another.” Air force commander General Carlos Alberto
Rhode claimed “there were errors and horrors by both camps” – the government and
the small guerrilla movement that fought it during the years of junta rule. But some
military personnel dissented, feeling the time had come to acknowledge past atroc-
ities. Admiral Jorge Godoy, commander of the Argentine navy, pointedly described
the Naval Mechanics School as “a symbol of barbarity and irrationality,” the site of
“aberrant acts, offensive to human dignity, ethics and law.”
The debate over the Museum of Memory typifies what Elizabeth Jelin has called
“‘legitimacy’ struggles over memory – who has what rights to determine what should
be remembered and how”:
Such moments of contestation over commemorations and memorials are markers
which provide clues to the processes of remembrance at the subjective and the
symbolic levels, where the memories of different social actors are enacted and
become “the present,” making it easier to analyze the construction of collective,
social and public memories.
But at these points, Jelin adds, “memories are multiple and at times in conflict.”
8
In large part, this reflects one’s positioning in the historical drama. Is one an older
person, with direct memories of the events? Is one younger, seeking to uncover the
secrets of one’s elders, or alternatively to “let the past take care of the past” and move
on? Is one a former collaborator with the repressive regime, anxious to justify the
collaboration retrospectively, or to mitigate personal guilt through confession and
public repentance? Is one a victim of the regime who feels that personal suffering
constitutes “the basic determinant of legitimacy and the claim to truth”?
9
Or does
suffering mean that one is unable to adopt an “objective” approach to the events?
The answers to these questions tell us something about how individual identities
are constructed through selective memory (as all memory is). Cumulatively, they also
say a great deal about how a society remembers, and why it remembers: that is, with
what collective or public purpose.
10
To understand this more deeply, let us consider
the German encounter with the history of massive Nazi atrocities against Jews and
others – as well as the suffering and destruction inflicted on Germans by the Allies.
MEMORY, FORGETTING, DENIAL
348
Germany and “the search for a usable past”
Germany’s reckoning with its Nazi past may be divided into three principal
stages. The first, extending from the war’s end to about the mid-1960s, was one
of willful amnesia, as Germans sought to put the war behind them. It has been
argued that this act of politicized forgetting (see further below) was significant in
allowing West Germans to build a prosperous and democratic state, while in Soviet-
controlled East Germany, Nazi sins could be displaced onto “fascism,” with the new
communist entity heroicized accordingly. In West Germany, to the extent that
victims were memorialized and commemorated, they were overwhelmingly German
victims – such as the hundreds of thousands of German POWs who remained in
Soviet camps, in many cases into the 1950s. The West German government under
Konrad Adenauer did initiate substantial reparations payments to Jews in the form
of financial transfers to Israel. This met with some public opposition. However, most
Germans seem to have welcomed it as a means of bolstering their alliance with the
West, rather than as an entrée to memorialization of Jewish suffering and German
guilt.
The upheavals of the 1960s radically destabilized this historical narrative. Survivors
and scholars of the genocide against the Jews explored the Holocaust systematically
for the first time. German scholars asserted historical continuities between the Nazi
and post-Nazi periods, including the role of large corporate enterprises that had
managed the transition smoothly from fascism to democracy. Some younger Germans
made pilgrimages to Israel to atone for the sins of their forebears. The Schuldfrage
(guilt issue) had taken center stage, symbolized by Chancellor Willi Brandt’s famous
kneeling apology for Nazi crimes (the so-called Kniefall) on a July 1970 visit to
Poland.
11
In academia, the ferment spilled over into the Historikerstreit (historians’
debate) of the 1970s and 1980s, “a scholarly controversy over the place and
significance of National Socialism and the Holocaust in the narrative of modern
German history.”
12
An older generation concerned with maintaining, for example,
a distinction between Nazi and German army practice, was confronted by mostly
younger scholars who challenged the assumptions and evasions of their seniors (see
also Chapter 6).
This second stage saw the German and Nazi past problematized, rendered
more complex and disturbing to ordinary Germans. It was prone to “irruptions of
memory” of the kind described by Alexander Wilde. These are “public events that
break in upon [the] national consciousness, unbidden and often suddenly, to evoke
associations with symbols, figures, causes, ways of life which to an unusual degree
are associated with a political past that is still present in the lived experience of a major
part of the population.”
13
One such irruption belonged to the realm of popular
culture: the broadcast of the US television mini-series Holocaust, which offered
Germans perhaps their first sustained depiction of the persecution of the Jews under
Nazism. Another was the visit of US President Ronald Reagan to the Bitburg military
cemetery, where German soldiers, including SS officers, were interred. The German
soldiers were “victims of Nazism also,” Reagan proclaimed. “They were victims, just
as surely as the victims in the concentration camps.”
14
His comments sparked a furor,
among US military veterans as well as among Jewish intellectuals and activists. In
MEMORY, FORGETTING, DENIAL
349
Germany, they provoked intense public discussion over whether Jewish and German
victimization should be mentioned in the same breath.
A third, somewhat amorphous stage began in the 1990s, in the wake of the
Historikerstreit, and carried over into the new millennium. It centered on the public
debate over three controversial books. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing
Executioners accused “ordinary Germans” of perpetrating many of the genocidal
atrocities of the Second World War. The book attracted a massive audience in
Germany, especially among the younger generation. Günter Grass’ Im Krebsgang
(Crabwalk), meanwhile, described events at the end of the war, when the Wilhelm
Gustloff cruise liner was torpedoed by a Soviet submarine, killing thousands of
German civilian refugees. Lastly, Jörg Friedrich’s Brandstätten (Fire Sites) provided
grisly photographic evidence of the effects of Allied fire-bombing of German cities.
(See Box 6a for more on Grass’ and Friedrich’s books.) Friedrich ably described the
public’s response to his book in terms that emphasized the emotional stress of
repressing memories, and the catharsis of their expression:
The bombing left an entire generation traumatised. But it was never discussed.
There are Germans whose first recollections are of being hidden by their mothers.
They remember cellars and burning human remains. It is only now that they are
coming to terms with what happened....[But] Germans in their seventies and
eighties have not forgotten. Their memories are still vivid. People stand up in my
public lectures and describe what befell their families. They have tears in their
eyes and they can’t breathe.
15
Also significant was the late 1990s controversy over a traveling exhibition of
photographs, organized by the Hamburg Institute for Social Research, that provided
vivid and chilling evidence of German army participation in atrocities against Jews,
Soviet prisoners-of-war, and others. The erstwhile distinction between Nazi “evil” and
army “honor” was no longer tenable.
16
Can a new, usable collective memory or public history be constructed out of these
diverse strands and fragments? Robert Moeller, a leading scholar of the subject,
appears to believe so. He favors narratives that “move beyond a language in which
the categories of victim and perpetrator were mutually exclusive,” seeking instead
“to capture the complexities of individual lives and ‘mass fates’ by exploring how
during the Third Reich it was possible both to suffer and to cause suffering in
others.”
17
But this project, it is fair to say, is only just beginning.
■
THE POLITICS OF FORGETTING
Forgetting – memory’s intimate partner – may also be examined in its individual and
collective dimensions. As Jörg Friedrich’s comments above attest, individuals may seek
to forget because it is painful to remember, or because they are convinced that no
one will listen respectfully to their stories. Such was the case with many survivors of
the Armenian and Jewish holocausts, who spent decades after the events seeking to
consign them to the historical past and build new lives. Forgetting may represent a
MEMORY, FORGETTING, DENIAL
350
final stage of revision and reinterpretation, to cancel any dissonance with one’s
preferred self-image. A common strategy is to displace others’ victimization onto
oneself. Atrocities that one may have perpetrated, supported, or ignored are crowded
out by memories of personal and collective victimization, whether experienced or
imagined.
At a societal level, “memorycide” – Mirko Grmek’s term – transfers to the
collectivity the struggle within individual souls. Nations seek to glorify the past,
forgetting its unsavory aspects. In the epilog to Gulag, her epic study of the Soviet
concentration camps (Chapter 5), Anne Applebaum notes the unwillingness of post-
Soviet Russians to come to terms with their twentieth-century history. The extent
of popular complicity in repression is one reason: “Society is indifferent to the crimes
of the past because so many people participated in them,” according to Alexander
Yakovlev, chair of a commission seeking to rehabilitate those unjustly convicted.
In addition, adds Applebaum, “the dominance of former communists [in present-
day governments] and the insufficient discussion of the past in the post-communist
world is not coincidental.” And forgetting may be useful for facilitating new bouts
of repression:
Acting in the name of the Soviet motherland, Stalin deported the Chechen nation
to the wastes of Kazakhstan, where half of them died and the rest were meant to
disappear, along with their language and culture [see Chapter 5]. Fifty years later,
in a repeat performance, the Russian federation obliterated the Chechen capital,
Grozny, and murdered tens of thousands of Chechen civilians in the course of
two wars [see Box 5a]. If the Russian people and the Russian elite remembered –
viscerally, emotionally remembered – what Stalin did to the Chechens, they could
not have invaded Chechnya in the 1990s, not once and not twice. To do so was
the moral equivalent of post-war Germany invading western Poland. Very few
Russians saw it that way – which is itself evidence of how little they know about
their own history.
18
What is forgotten, there is no need to deny; but this is often not such a simple
proposition. Irruptions of memory, struggles over historical interpretation, mean that
inconvenient and dissonant evidence is always in danger of resurging to challenge
societies’ and individuals’ most cherished perspectives. Where these challenges prove
intolerable a new framework may be constructed – or a systematic campaign of denial
mounted.
■
GENOCIDE DENIAL: MOTIVES AND STRATEGIES
Denial is viewed increasingly as a final stage of genocide, and an indispensable one
from the viewpoint of the génocidaires. “The perpetrators of genocide dig up the mass
graves, burn the bodies, try to cover up the evidence and intimidate the witnesses.
They deny that they committed any crimes, and often blame what happened on the
victims.”
19
As Richard Hovannisian has written:
MEMORY, FORGETTING, DENIAL
351
Following the physical destruction of a people and their material culture, memory
is all that is left and is targeted as the last victim. Complete annihilation of people
requires the banishment of recollection and the suffocation of remembrance.
Falsification, deception, and half-truths reduce what was to what may have been
or perhaps what was not at all.
20
The phenomenon of genocide denial is overwhelmingly associated with the Jewish
Holocaust. Since this resurged in the public consciousness in the early 1960s, a diverse
and interlinked network of Holocaust deniers has arisen. In Europe, a centuries-old
tradition of anti-semitism (see Chapter 6) underlies their activities, which overlap
with neo-Nazi violence against Jews and their property. In North America, the neo-
Nazi element is also strong. In both “wings” of the denialist movement, however,
academic figures – such as Arthur Butz in the US, David Irving in Great Britain, and
Robert Faurisson in France – have also sought to provide a veneer of respectability
for the enterprise.
We will consider specific denial strategies below, but before we do, it is important
to stress that the Jewish Holocaust is not officially denied by any state or national
elite (though denial is common intellectual currency in the Arab and Muslim
world).
21
Thus, in the West at least, deniers of the Jewish catastrophe remain relatively
marginal figures, with little access to the mainstream.
However, the broader phenomenon of genocide denial is far more deeply
entrenched, often representing a societal consensus rather than a fringe position.
Individual and collective narcissism (Chapter 10) play a pivotal role in buttressing
denial; in many contexts, a denialist stance heads off cognitive dissonance between
one’s preferred view of self and country, and the grimmer reality. There is also usually
an element of material self-interest. Denial can pay well, since it fortifies the status
quo and serves powerful and prosperous constituencies, both political and corporate.
Positive rewards are combined with sanctions. Failure to deny (that is, a determination
to acknowledge) may result in the loss or denial of employment; decreased social
standing; dismissal as a “kook” and a “radical”; and so on.
Among the most common discourses of genocide denial are the following:
“Hardly anybody died.” Reports of atrocities and mass killings are depicted as
exaggerated and self-serving. (The fact that some reports are distorted and self-
interested lends credibility to this strategy.) Photographic and video evidence is
dismissed as fake or staged. Gaps in physical evidence are exploited, particularly an
absence of corpses. Where are the bodies of the Jews killed by the Nazis? (Incinerated,
conveniently for the deniers.) Where are the bodies of the supposed thousands of
Kosovars killed by Serbs in 1999? (Buried on military and police bases, or dumped
in rivers and down mineshafts, as it turned out.) When the genocides lie far in the
past, obfuscation is easier. Genocides of indigenous peoples are especially subject to
this form of denial. In many cases, the groups in question suffered near-total exter-
mination, leaving few descendants and advocates to press the case for truth.
“It was self-defense.” Murdered civilians – especially adult males (Chapter 13) –
are depicted as “rebels,” “brigands,” and “terrorists.” The state and its allies are
justified in eliminating them, though unfortunate “excesses” may occur. Deniers of
the Armenian genocide, for example, play up the presence of armed elements and
MEMORY, FORGETTING, DENIAL
352
resistance among the Armenian population – even clearly defensive resistance.
Likewise, deniers of Nazi genocide against Jews turn cartwheels to demonstrate “that
Weltjudentum (world Jewry) had declared war on Germany in 1933, and the Nazis,
as the ruling party of the nation, had simply reacted to the threat.”
22
Jews were
variously depicted as predatory capitalists, decadent cosmopolitans, and architects
of global communism. The organizers of the third “classic” genocide of the twentieth
century, in Rwanda, alleged that the assault on Tutsis was a legitimate response to
armed invasion by Tutsi rebels based in Uganda, and the supposed machinations of
a Tutsi “fifth column” in Rwanda itself.
A substrategy of this discourse is the claim that “the violence was mutual.” Where
genocides occur in a context of civil or international war, they can be depicted as
part of generalized warfare, perhaps featuring atrocities on all sides. This strategy is
standard among the deniers of genocides by Turks, Japanese,
23
Serbs, Hutus, and West
Pakistanis – to name just a few. In Australia, Keith Windschuttle has used killings
of whites by Aboriginals to denounce “The Myths of Frontier Massacres in Australian
History.”
24
(See also “We are the real victims,” below.) Sometimes the deniers seem
actually oblivious to the content of their claims, reflecting deeply embedded
stereotypes and pervasive ignorance, rather than malicious intent. As I write these
words, a CNN International reporter has just referred to the world standing by and
“watch[ing] Hutus and Tutsis kill each other” during the Rwanda genocide of 1994.
25
“The deaths weren’t intentional.” The difficulties of demonstrating and docu-
menting genocidal intent are exploited to deny that genocide occurred. The utility
of this strategy is enhanced where a longer causal chain underlies massive mortality.
Thus, when diverse factors combine to cause death, or when supposedly “natural”
elements such as disease and famine account for many or most deaths, this denialist
discourse is especially appealing. It underpins most denials of indigenous genocides,
for example (see Chapter 3). Deniers of the Armenian and Jewish holocausts also
contend that most deaths occurred from privations and afflictions that were
inevitable, if regrettable, in a wartime context – in any case, not genocidal.
“There was no central direction.” Frequently, states and their agents establish a
degree of deniability by employing freelance agents such as paramilitaries (as in
Bosnia-Herzegovina and Darfur), criminal elements (e.g., the chétés in the Armenian
genocide), or members of the targeted groups themselves (Jewish kapos in the Nazi
death camps; Mayan peasants conscripted for genocide against Mayan populations
of the Guatemalan highlands). State attempts to eliminate evidence may mean that
documentation of central direction, as of genocidal intent, is scarce. Many deniers
of the Jewish Holocaust emphasize the lack of a clear order from Hitler or his top
associates to exterminate European Jews. Armenian genocide denial similarly centers
on the supposed freelance status of those who carried out whatever atrocities are
admitted to have occurred.
“There weren’t that many people to begin with.” Where demographic data provide
support for claims of genocide, denialists will gravitate towards the lowest available
figures for the targeted population, or invent new ones. The effect is to cast doubt
on mortality statistics by downplaying the victims’ demographic weight at the
outbreak of genocide. This strategy is especially common in denials of genocide
against indigenous peoples, as well as the Ottoman genocide against Armenians.
MEMORY, FORGETTING, DENIAL
353
“It wasn’t / isn’t ‘genocide,’ because . . .” Here, the ambiguities of the UN Genocide
Convention are exploited, and combined with the denial strategies already cited.
Atrocious events do not qualify as “genocide”...because the victims were not
members of one of the Convention’s specified groups; because their deaths were
unintended; because they were legitimate targets; because “only” specific sectors of
the target group were killed; because “war is hell”; and so on.
“W
e would never do that.” Collective pathological narcissism (see Chapter 10)
occludes the acknowledgment, or even the conscious consideration, of genocide.
When the state and its citizens consider themselves pure, peaceful, democratic,
and law-abiding, responsibility for atrocity may be literally unthinkable. In Turkey,
notes Taner Akçam, anyone “dar[ing] to speak about the Armenian Genocide...is
aggressively attacked as a traitor, singled out for public condemnation and may even
be put in prison.”
26
In Australia, “the very mention of an Australian genocide is...
appalling and galling and must be put aside,” according to Colin Tatz. “A curious
national belief is that simply being Australian, whether by birth or naturalisation, is
sufficient inoculation against deviation from moral and righteous behaviour.”
27
Comedian Rob Corddry parodied this mindset in the context of US abuses and
atrocities at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad. “There’s no question what took
place in that prison was horrible,” Corddry said on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.
“But the Arab world has to realize that the US shouldn’t be judged on the actions of
a...well, we shouldn’t be judged on actions. It’s our principles that matter, our
inspiring, abstract notions. Remember: just because torturing prisoners is something
we did, doesn’t mean it’s something we would do.”
28
“We are the real victims.” For deniers, the best defense is often a strong offense.
With its “Day of Fallen Diplomats,” Turkey uses Armenian terrorist attacks against
Turkish diplomatic staff to pre-empt attention to the Turkish genocide against
Armenians. In the case of Germany and the Nazi holocaust, there is a point at which
a victim mentality concentrating on German suffering leads to the horrors that
Germans inflicted, on Jews and others, being downgraded or denied. In the Balkans,
a discourse of genocide was first deployed by Serb intellectuals promoting a
nationalist–xenophobic project; the only “genocide” admitted was that against Serbs,
whether by Croatians in the Second World War (which indeed occurred), or in
Kosovo at the hands of the Albanian majority (which was a paranoid fantasy).
Notably, this stress on victimhood provided powerful fuel for unleashing the
genocides in the first place; the discussion of humiliation in Chapter 10 is worth
recalling here.
29
■
DENIAL AND FREE SPEECH
What are the acceptable limits of denialist discourse in a free society? Should all denial
be suppressed? Should it be permitted in the interest of preserving a liberal public
sphere?
In recent years, many countries in the West have grappled with these questions.
Varied approaches have been adopted, ranging from monitoring denialist discourse,
to punitive measures including fines, imprisonment, and deportation. At the
MEMORY, FORGETTING, DENIAL
354
permissive end of the spectrum lies the United States. There, notorious deniers of
the Jewish Holocaust, as well as neo-Nazi and Ku Klux Klan-style organizations,
operate mostly unimpeded, albeit sometimes surveilled and infiltrated by government
agents. A much harder line has been enforced in France and Canada. In France,
Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson was stripped of his university teaching position
and hauled before a court for denying that the Nazi gas chambers had existed.
Eventually, in July 1981, the Paris Court of Appeals assessed “personal damages”
against Faurisson, based on the likelihood “that his words would arouse in his very
large audience feelings of contempt, of hatred and of violence towards the Jews in
France.”
30
In Canada, Alberta teacher Jim Keegstra “for twelve years . . . indoctrinated his
students with Jewish conspiracy explanations of history...biased statements princi-
pally about Jews, but also about Catholics, Blacks, and others.”
31
His passage through
the Canadian justice system was labyrinthine. In 1982, Keegstra was dismissed from
his job and, in 1984, charged with promoting racial hatred. In 1985, he was
convicted, and sentenced to five months in jail and a $5,000 fine. The decision was
overturned by the Alberta Court of Appeal, however, citing Canada’s Charter of
Rights and Freedoms; but Canada’s Supreme Court subsequently ruled (narrowly)
that hate speech was not constitutionally protected. In 1992, Keegstra was retried
in Alberta and convicted. Once again, the conviction was overturned on appeal, this
time on procedural grounds. At the time of writing, it was possible the case would
be heard a second time before the Supreme Court of Canada.
32
Undoubtedly the most famous trial involving a genocide denier is the libel
case brought in 2000 by David Irving, an amateur historian of some early repute
who nonetheless cast doubt and aspersions on the genocide of the Jews. Deborah
Lipstadt accused Irving of genocide denial in her book Denying the Holocaust,
referring to him as a “discredited” scholar and “one of the most dangerous spokesper-
sons for Holocaust denial.”
33
She also pointed to his links with neo-fascist figures
and movements. Irving exploited Britain’s loose libel laws to file a suit for defamation.
The resulting trial became a cause célèbre, with prominent historians taking the stand
to outline Irving’s evasions and obfuscations of the historical evidence, as well as the
character of his personal associations. The final, 350-page judgment by Judge Charles
Gray cited Irving for nineteen specific misrepresentations, and contended that they
were deliberate distortions to advance a denialist agenda. Irving’s suit was dismissed,
leaving him with a two-million-pound bill for legal costs – though he was subject to
no legal sanction per se.
The spectrum of policies towards deniers, from permissive to prosecutory, is
mirrored by the debate among genocide scholars. Those who call for punitive
measures against deniers stress the link between denial and genocide, including future
genocides, as well as the personal suffering that denial inflicts on a genocide’s survivors
and their descendants. This argument is made eloquently by Roger Smith, Eric
Markusen, and Robert Jay Lifton, who hold that:
denial of genocide [is] an egregious offense that warrants being regarded as a form
of contribution to genocidal violence. Denial contributes to genocide in at least
two ways. First of all, genocide does not end with its last human victim; denial
MEMORY, FORGETTING, DENIAL
355
continues the process, but if denial points to the past and the present, it also has
implications for the future. By absolving the perpetrators of past genocides from
responsibility for their actions and by obscuring the reality of genocide as a widely
practiced form of state policy in the modern world, denial may increase the risk
of future outbreaks of genocidal killing.
They especially condemn the actions of some professional scholars in bolstering
various denial projects:
Where scholars deny genocide, in the face of decisive evidence that it has occurred,
they contribute to a false consciousness that can have the most dire reverberations.
Their message, in effect, is: murderers did not really murder; victims were not
really killed; mass murder requires no confrontation, no reflection, but should be
ignored, glossed over. In this way scholars lend their considerable authority
to the acceptance of this ultimate human crime. More than that, they encourage
– indeed invite – a repetition of that crime from virtually any source in the
immediate or distant future. By closing their minds to truth such scholars con-
tribute to the deadly psychohistorical dynamic in which unopposed genocide
begets new genocides.
34
The opposing view does not dispute the corruption of scholarship that genocide
denial represents. However, it rejects the authority of the state to punish “speech
crimes”; it stresses the arbitrariness that governs which genocide denials are
prohibited; and it calls for proactive engagement and public denunciation in place
of censorship and prosecution. A leading exponent of such views is the political
scholar and commentator Noam Chomsky, whose most bitter controversy revolves
around a defense of the right of Robert Faurisson to air his denialist views. In an
essay titled “Some Elementary Comments on the Rights of Freedom of Expression,”
published (without his prior knowledge) as a Foreword to Faurisson’s Mémoire en
défense, Chomsky depicted calls to ban Faurisson from teaching, even to physically
attack him, as in keeping with authoritarian tradition:
Such attitudes are not uncommon. They are typical, for example, of American
Communists and no doubt their counterparts elsewhere. Among people who have
learned something from the 18th century (say, Voltaire) it is a truism, hardly
deserving discussion, that the defense of the right of free expression is not restricted
to ideas one approves of, and that it is precisely in the case of ideas found most
offensive that these rights must be most vigorously defended. Advocacy of the right
to express ideas that are generally approved is, quite obviously, a matter of no
significance. ...Even if Faurisson were to be a rabid anti-Semite and fanatic pro-
Nazi . . . this would have no bearing whatsoever on the legitimacy of the defense
of his civil rights. On the contrary, it would make it all the more imperative to
defend them.
35
Each of these perspectives brings important ideas to the table. To expand on Smith
et al.’s reasoning: in most societies, some speech is subject to legal sanction – libelous,
MEMORY, FORGETTING, DENIAL
356
threatening, and obscene speech, for instance. It can reasonably be asked whether
genocide denial does not do greater harm to society, and pose a greater threat, than
personal libels or dirty words. Is not genocide denial a libel against an entire people?
And is the threat it poses not extreme, given that denial may sow the seeds of future
genocides?
The case is a powerful one, and yet I find myself generally in agreement with
Chomsky. Free speech only has meaning at the margins. Banning marginal discourses
undermines liberal freedoms. Moreover, only a handful of deniers – principally those
assailing the Jewish and Armenian holocausts – have attracted controversy for their
views. The president (François Mitterrand) of the same French state that prosecuted
Robert Faurisson not only actively supported Rwanda’s génocidaires – before, during,
and after the 1994 catastrophe – but when asked later about the genocide, responded:
“The genocide or the genocides? I don’t know what one should say!” As Gérard
Prunier notes, “this public accolade for the so-called ‘theory of the double genocide’
[i.e., by Tutsis against France’s Hutu allies, as well as by Hutus against Tutsis] was
an absolute shame.”
36
It advanced a key thesis of genocide deniers: that the violence
was mutual or defensive in nature. But Mitterrand’s words were widely ignored;
he was certainly in no danger of being arraigned before a tribunal. Likewise, the
Canadian state that prosecuted Jim Keegstra was the same that shamefully “dodged
implementation of the Genocide Convention” by “quietly redefining the crime in the
country’s domestic enforcement statute so as to omit any mention of policies and
actions in which Canada was and is engaged,” specifically its genocide against native
peoples.
37
Quis custodiet custodiens – who will judge the judges?
One wonders, as well, whether the names and mendacious views of people such
as Irving, Faurisson, and Keegstra would be remotely as prominent, if prosecutions
and other measures had not been mounted against them.
38
(Indeed, it makes me
queasy to print them here.) These individuals, and the initiatives they sponsor, are
best confronted with a combination of monitoring, marginalization, and effective
public refutation. Such refutation can be accomplished by visible and vocal denun-
ciation, informed by conscientious reportage and scholarship, as well as through
proactive campaigns in schools and the mass media.
While genocide denial in the public sphere may be destructive, for genocide
scholars and students its consequences may actually be productive. Professional
deniers have spurred scholarship in areas that otherwise might not have attracted
it.
39
Moreover, not all “denial” is malevolent. Whether a genocide framework should
be applied in a given case is often a matter of lively and legitimate debate. In recent
decades, the character and content of mass killing campaigns in Bosnia and Kosovo,
Darfur, Biafra (Nigeria), East Timor, Guatemala, and Vietnam have been intensively
analyzed and hotly disputed. I believe this is to be encouraged, even though I find
some of the views expressed to be disturbing and disheartening. Keeping denial of
all genocides out of the realm of crime and punishment may be the price we pay for
this vigorous exchange.
40
MEMORY, FORGETTING, DENIAL
357
■
FURTHER STUDY
Stanley Cohen, States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering. Cambridge:
Polity Press, 2001. Acute insights into denial, and efforts to counter it, on both
personal and societal levels.
Richard J. Evans, Lying About Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial.
New York: Basic Books, 2001. Briskly paced account of Irving’s defamation suit,
by a historian who served as a defense witness.
John R. Gillis, ed., Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1994. How collective memory shapes national
identity.
Jeffrey Herf, Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanies. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1997. Intricate rendering of Germany’s “search for a
usable past.”
Richard G. Hovannisian, ed., Remembrance and Denial: The Case of the Armenian
Genocide. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1999. Seminal essays on
Armenian genocide denial and its place in collective memory.
Deborah E. Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and
Memory. New York: Plume, 1994. Survey of denial’s exponents that prompted
David Irving’s failed legal action against Lipstadt.
David E. Lorey and William H. Beezley, eds, Genocide, Collective Violence, and
Popular Memory: The Politics of Remembrance in the Twentieth Century.
Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 2002. The best introduction to genocide
and memory.
Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life. Boston, MA: Mariner Books, 2000.
Fascinating exploration of how the Jewish Holocaust was remembered and
deployed by American Jews and others.
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-four. London: Penguin, 1983. Dark satire of the
manipulation of history and memory under totalitarianism.
Michael Shermer, Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why
Do They Say It? (rev. edn). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000.
Richly documented rebuttal of deniers of the Jewish Holocaust.
Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural
History. Cambridge: Canto, 1998. History, memory, and memorialization in
post-First World War Europe.
■
NOTES
1 Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (London: Phoenix, 2004),
p. 142.
2 The two best English-language overviews are Martin Edwin Andersen, Dossier Secreto:
Argentina’s Desaparecidos and the Myth of the “Dirty War” (Boulder, CO: Westview Press,
1993), and Paul H. Lewis, Guerrillas and Generals: The “Dirty War” in Argentina
(Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2002). A concise summary from a genocide studies
perspective is “The Disappearances: Mass Killing in Argentina,” ch. 14 in Ervin Staub,
The Roots of Evil: The Origins of Genocide and Other Group Violence (Cambridge:
MEMORY, FORGETTING, DENIAL
358
Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 210–31. The kidnapping of infants was the
subject of an Oscar-winning Argentine film, The Official Story (1985).
3 The Falkland Islands are known as Islas Malvinas to Argentines.
4 Amnesty International, “Argentina: The Military Juntas and Human Rights,” in William
L. Hewitt, ed., Defining the Horrific: Readings on Genocide and Holocaust in the Twentieth
Century (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson, 2004), p. 247.
5 In November 2003, together with a small group of other foreign scholars, I attended
what was probably the first international conference on genocide in South America, held
at the University of Buenos Aires. At a guess, 75 or 80 percent of the presentations dealt
with the “genocide in Argentina” under military rule. Without exception, all the
presenters took it as a given that the events in question had constituted genocide. This
would be much more controversial among genocide scholars in the West, given the
limited number of victims, and the fact that the violence was targeted against alleged
members of a political group. In conversation with some of the Argentine scholars,
though, it became clear to me that not only did they consider the term valid, but
they regarded its application as vital to memorializing the events and validating victims’
suffering.
6 Larry Rohter, “Debate Rises in Argentina on Museum of Abuses,” New York Times, April
19, 2004. Unless otherwise specified, all quotes in this discussion of the Museum of
Memory are drawn from Rohter’s article.
7 However, junta leader General Videla was jailed in June 1997 for the kidnapping of
children, which was held to lie beyond the boundaries of the punto final.
8 Elizabeth Jelin, “The Minefields of Memory,” NACLA Report on the Americas, 32: 2
(September/October 1998), p. 25. Martha Minow writes: “Memorials can name those
who were killed; they can depict those who resisted and those who rescued. They can
accord honor and confer heroic status; they can express shame, remorse, warning, shock.
Devoting public space to memories of atrocities means devoting time and energy to
decisions about what kinds of memories, images, and messages to embrace, critique, and
resist....Vividly capturing and recasting memory, fights over monuments in the streets
and in debates usefully disturb congealed memories and mark important junctions
between the past and a newly invented present.” Minow, Between Vengeance and
Forgiveness: Facing History after Genocide and Mass Violence (Boston, MA: Beacon Press,
1998), pp. 138, 140.
9 Jelin, “The Minefields of Memory,” pp. 26, 28.
10 For some nuanced and cautionary comments on public memory, see Jay Winter, “The
Generation of Memory: Reflections on the ‘Memory Boom’ in Contemporary Historical
Studies,” GHI Bulletin, 27, http://www.ghi-dc.org/bulletin27F00/b27winter.html.
11 For text and a vivid photograph, see “Encyclopedia: Warschauer Kniefall,” Nation
Master.com, http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Warschauer-Kniefall. “The
event made Brandt widely unpopular in Germany, especially among conservatives and
liberals but also many social democrats, and he was heavily criticized by the press for being
unpatriotic....Eventually, [however,] even many Germans came to see it as a coura-
geous and honorable decision.”
12 Robert G. Moeller, “War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic
of Germany,” in Lorey and Beezley, eds, Genocide, Collective Violence, and Popular
Memory, pp. 206, 211.
13 Alexander Wilde, “Irruptions of Memory: Expressive Politics in Chile’s Transition to
Democracy,” in Lorey and Beezley, eds, Genocide, Collective Violence, and Popular
Memory, p. 4.
14 Quoted in Moeller, “War Stories,” p. 210. On Bitburg, see also Jeffrey Herf, Divided
Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1997), pp. 350–54.
15 Friedrich quoted in J.M. Coetzee, “Victims” (review of Günter Grass, Crabwalk), New
York Review of Books, June 12, 2003.
16 See the companion volume for the exhibition: Hamburg Institute for Social Research,
MEMORY, FORGETTING, DENIAL
359
The German Army and Genocide: Crimes Against War Prisoners, Jews, and Other Civilians
in the East, 1939–1944 (New York: New Press, 1999).
17 Moeller, “War Stories,” p. 216.
18 Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History (London: Penguin, 2004), pp. 508–10.
19 Gregory H. Stanton, “Eight Stages of Genocide,” http://www.genocidewatch.org/
8stages.htm.
20 Richard G. Hovannisian, “Denial of the Armenian Genocide in Comparison with
Holocaust Denial,” in Hovannisian, ed., Remembrance and Denial: The Case of the
Armenian Genocide (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1999), p. 202.
21 For a summary, with many examples, see Anti-Defamation League, “Holocaust Denial
in the Middle East: The Latest Anti-Israel Propaganda Theme,” http://www.adl.org/
holocaust/denial_ME/Holocaust_Denial_Mid_East_prt.pdf.
22 Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman, Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never
Happened and Why Do They Say It? (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002),
p. 40.
23 Japanese denial of its genocidal atrocities against the Chinese and other Asian peoples
during the Second World War is one of the most notorious and best-studied cases. “Japan
has always presented itself as the victim of the war and has consistently ignored and
repressed any attempts to focus on its aggression and war crimes....The Japanese
government and society have conducted an intensive and successful repression of any
information about the war in which Japan is not presented as a peace-loving nation or in
which anything negative about its history is mentioned.” Elazar Barkan, The Guilt of
Nations: Restitution and Negotiating Historical Injustices (New York: W.W. Norton,
2000), pp. 50, 60. Japanese governments and education authorities have persistently
depicted the Japanese invasion and occupation of its “Greater Asian Co-prosperity
Sphere” as a defensive response to a campaign of US economic warfare and political
isolation; downplayed the horrors of events such as the Nanjing Massacre of 1937–38
(see Chapter 2); and played up Japanese suffering at Allied hands, especially in the area-
bombing raids and atomic attacks. For an overview, see Gavan McCormack, “Reflections
on Modern Japanese History in the Context of the Concept of Genocide,” ch. 16 in
Robert Gellately and Ben Kiernan, eds, The Specter of Genocide: Mass Murder in Historical
Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 265–88.
24 For a summary and debunking, see Ben Kiernan, “Cover-up and Denial of Genocide:
Australia, the USA, East Timor, and the Aborigines,” Critical Asian Studies, 34: 2 (2002),
pp. 180–82.
25 CNN International broadcast, December 31, 2004.
26 Taner Akçam, From Empire to Republic: Turkish Nationalism and the Armenian Genocide
(London: Zed Books, 2004), p. 209.
27 Colin Tatz, With Intent to Destroy: Reflecting on Genocide (London: Verso, 2003),
p. 137.
28 Corddry quoted in Alan Shapiro, “American Treatment of Iraqi and Afghan Prisoners:
An Introduction,” TeachableMoment.org, http://www.teachablemoment.org/high/
prisoners.html.
29 A grimly ironic variation on this theme is the exceptionalist approach adopted by some
victims of genocide or their descendants, claiming an “exclusivity of suffering” at the
expense of other victim groups. Hence, for many years a tacit understanding prevailed
among politically powerful sectors of Turkish and Israeli society to marginalize the
Armenian genocide by proclaiming the uniqueness and incommensurability of the Jewish
Holocaust. Thea Halo has contended, in turn, that too many scholars, activists, and
scholar-activists have focused so intensively on Armenian suffering during and after the
First World War that they have effectively denied comparable atrocities inflicted by the
Ottomans upon other Christian populations of their realm, notably Assyrians and Pontic
Greeks. Halo writes: “The expropriation of an evil so egregious and monumental,
strips the other nameless victims of that same monumental evil, of their rightful place in
history, as if they never existed, thereby assuring that their Genocide is complete.” Halo,
MEMORY, FORGETTING, DENIAL
360
“The Exclusivity of Suffering: When Tribal Concerns Take Precedence over Historical
Accuracy,” unpublished research paper, 2004.
30 Paris court judgment cited in Shermer and Grobman, Denying History, pp. 10–11.
31 David Bercuson and Douglas Wertheimer, quoted in Luke McNamara, “Criminalising
Racial Hatred: Learning from the Canadian Experience,” Australian Journal of Human
Rights, 1: 1 (1994). Available online at http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/other/ahric/ajhr/
V1N1/ajhr1113.html.
32 See McNamara, “Criminalising Racial Hatred.” The case of Ernst Zündel, a German-
born denier of the Jewish Holocaust, has also attracted polemics in recent years. Zündel
became “a political hot potato to immigration officials in Canada and the United States.”
Moving from Canada to the US when the Canadian government denied his application
for citizenship, Zündel was then deported back to Canada, and then on to Germany,
where he sits in prison at the time of writing. See CBC News Online, “Indepth:
Ernst Zundel,” September 30, 2004, http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/zundel/;
“Holocaust Denier Behind Bars in Germany,” CTV.ca, March 2, 2005.
33 Richard J. Evans, Lying About Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial (New
York: Basic Books, 2001), p. 6. Evans was one of the historians who testified at the trial;
his book provides an excellent overview of the proceedings.
34 Roger W. Smith, Eric Markusen, and Robert Jay Lifton, “Professional Ethics and
the Denial of the Armenian Genocide,” in Hovannisian, ed., Remembrance and Denial,
pp. 287, 289.
35 Noam Chomsky, “Some Elementary Comments on the Rights of Freedom of
Expression,” http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/articles/8010-free-expression.html. Much
controversy attached to Chomsky’s comment in this essay that “As far as I can determine,
he [Faurisson] is a relatively apolitical liberal of some sort.”
36 Gérard Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1997), p. 339.
37 “Thus, the [UN] convention’s prohibitions of policies causing serious bodily or mental
harm to members of a target group and/or effecting the forcible transfer of their children
were from the first moment expunged from Canada’s ‘legal understanding.’ In 1985, the
Canadian statute was further ‘revised’ to delete measures intended to prevent births
within a target group from the list of proscribed policies and activities....At least one
Canadian court, moreover, has recently entered a decree making it a criminal offense for
anyone to employ the term [‘genocide’] in any other way.” Ward Churchill, “Genocide
by Any Other Name: North American Indian Residential Schools in Context,” in Adam
Jones, ed., Genocide, War Crimes and the West: History and Complicity (London: Zed
Books, 2004), pp. 83–84.
38 After the David Irving decision, historian Andrew Roberts claimed the judgment against
Irving was at best a partial victory, since “the free publicity that this trial has generated
for him and his views has been worth far more than could ever have been bought for the
amount of the costs.” Quoted in Evans, Lying About Hitler, p. 235.
39 According to Colin Tatz, “for all the company they keep, and for all their outpourings,
these deniers assist rather than hinder genocide and Holocaust research,” in part by
“prompt[ing] studies by men and women of eminence . . . who would otherwise not have
written on genocide.” Tatz, With Intent to Destroy, pp. 139–40.
40 For a discussion of responsible versus malicious denial of a genocide framework for
Cambodia, see Ben Kiernan, “Bringing the Khmer Rouge to Justice,” Human Rights
Review, 1: 3 (April–June 2000), pp. 92–108.
MEMORY, FORGETTING, DENIAL
361
Justice, Truth, and
Redress
What can justice mean when genocide is the issue?
Terrence Des Pres
The legal strictures against genocide constitute jus cogens: they are among the laws
“accepted and recognized by the international community of States as a whole from
which no derogation is permitted.” Jus cogens is associated with the principle of
universal jurisdiction (quasi delicta juris gentium), which “applies to a limited number
of crimes for which any State, even absent a personal or territorial link with the
offence, is entitled to try the offender.”
1
There is theory, however, and there is practice. After the UN Convention came
into force in 1951, genocide was all but ignored in international law. On the
international scene, the word was commonly deployed for propaganda purposes.
For example, the resurgence of interest in the Jewish Holocaust, and the roughly
contemporary rise of Israel to major-power status, made “genocide” an attractive
verbal weapon for Palestinians and their Arab allies. National-level trials occasionally
employed the term, as with Israel’s prosecution of Adolf Eichmann in 1961, and
Ethiopia’s proceedings against members of the Dergue regime (see below). But overall,
a conspiracy of silence prevailed in diplomatic quarters and at the United Nations.
Diplomatic norms militated against such grave accusations, while states’ bloody
hands meant that there was always a danger that allegations could rebound on the
accuser through the defense of tu quoque, “a plea that the adversary committed similar
atrocities.”
2
362
CHAPTER 15
Despite this passivity, the twentieth century did produce revolutionary new
forms of international justice. Formal mechanisms ranged from the humanitarian law
of the Hague Conventions (1899, 1907) and Geneva Conventions (1949); to war
crimes tribunals at Nuremberg and for Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and Sierra Leone; and
most recently to an International Criminal Court (ICC) with universal jurisdic-
tion though, alas, not yet universal membership. These were accompanied by less
formal institutions, such as the “truth commissions” mounted under both national
and international aegis, and investigative bodies that may blow the whistle on
genocide, whether past, present, or incipient. Such efforts also feature substantial
public involvement, especially by religious and human rights NGOs, academics, and
legal professionals – a phenomenon that can be traced back to the international
campaigns against slavery and the Congo “rubber terror” in the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries.
This penultimate chapter explores the interrelation of justice, truth-seeking, and
redress as they have evolved both nationally and internationally.
■
LEIPZIG, CONSTANTINOPLE, NUREMBERG, TOKYO
The move towards tribunals for war crimes and “crimes against humanity” reflected
the growing institutionalization and codification of humanitarian instruments over
the latter half of the nineteenth century. This was evident in the formative efforts of
Henri Dunand and his International Committee of the Red Cross, founded in 1864.
The Red Cross was a pioneering institution in addressing suffering that offends the
human conscience. Leaders were also becoming more aware of “crimes against
humanity,” albeit selectively. Consider British politician William Gladstone’s 1870
fulmination against Ottoman atrocities in the Balkans:
Certain it is that a new law of nations is gradually taking hold of the mind, and
coming to sway the practice, of the world; a law which recognises independence,
which frowns upon aggression, which favours the pacific, not the bloody settle-
ment of disputes, which aims at permanent and not temporary adjustments; above
all, which recognises, as a tribunal of paramount authority, the general judgment
of civilised mankind.
3
Much the same speech could have been given for the drafting of the Rome Statute
of the International Criminal Court (1998), suggesting that Gladstone was overly
optimistic in his assessment. But his generation did witness epic advances in human
freedom. The abolition of slavery in the United States (1861) and Brazil (1888) were
high watermarks. They were accompanied by swelling campaigns against the Congo
“rubber terror,” pogroms against Russian Jews, and early Ottoman massacres of
Armenians (1894–96, presaging the holocaust of 1915–16).
At century’s end, Russian Tsar Nicholas convened an international conference
on war prevention at the Hague in Holland. This led to two seminal conventions,
in 1899 and 1907, that placed limits on “legitimate” methods of warfare, including
bans on civilian bombardments and the use of poison gas. All sides abrogated the
agreements only a few years later, during the First World War (1914–18). But the new
JUSTICE, TRUTH, REDRESS
363
framings shaped the postwar world – including the 1927 Protocol against chemical
and biological warfare, which remains in force.
As part of the punitive peace imposed on Germany at Versailles, a few desultory
trials of alleged war criminals took place before German courts at Leipzig. They ended
in fiasco, with the Allies divided among themselves, and German opposition to the
initiative effectively unchallenged. A similar dynamic prevailed in the trials that Allied
occupiers imposed on Turkey, described in Chapter 4.
More high-profile, and successful, were the international tribunals at Nuremberg
and Tokyo following the Second World War.
4
Trials were by no means foreordained
as a strategy for handling German and Japanese war criminals. Intense debates
took place within the Allied coalition during 1943–45. Both Winston Churchill and
Joseph Stalin pushed for summary executions of top Nazi echelons.
5
Franklin
Roosevelt considered the wholesale demilitarization, deindustrialization, and dis-
memberment of Germany (the so-called “Morgenthau Plan”). This was in harmony
with much of public opinion in the Allied countries: few people viewed tribunals as
the optimal way of dealing with enemy war crimes.
However, a legal process was finally settled upon in both the German and Japanese
cases. This was, indisputably, a seminal advance in international jurisprudence.
Nuremberg featured “the first official mention of genocide in an international legal
setting,” as all the German defendants were accused of “conduct[ing] deliberate
and systematic genocide, viz., the extermination of racial and national groups, against
the civilian populations of certain occupied territories.”
6
Raphael Lemkin’s tire-
less lobbying had paid dividends, though, as noted in Chapter 1, “genocide” formed
no part of the Nuremberg verdicts. (Nor could it have, since it was not at the time
enshrined in international law.)
7
Both tribunals were flawed. Leaders were tried only for crimes committed in
wartime. Nazi actions against the Jews prior to September 1, 1939, for example, were
absent from the Nuremberg indictments. Nazi crimes against Jews, Roma, and other
groups were downplayed, while charges of waging aggressive war were emphasized.
Japanese atrocities against Chinese and other Asian civilians were similarly under-
stressed, by contrast with allegations of the murderous abuse of Allied prisoners-
of-war.
The long-established principle of nullum crimen sine lege – no crime without
an accompanying law – was implemented in “an extremely loose and controversial”
way at Nuremberg. Leaders were tried for crimes that had not formally existed at the
time they were committed.
8
In addition, prosecutors at both the Nuremberg and
Tokyo tribunals avoided charging Germans and Japanese with atrocities that the
Allies had also inflicted. Thus, while indiscriminate bombardment of civilians was
long established as a core war crime, it could not be prosecuted without providing
the accused with a ready-made tu quoque defense. Even so, an Indian judge at Tokyo,
Rahadbinod Pal, dissented from the majority verdict, labeling the trial a sham for
its inattention to the Allies’ own crimes.
9
In one case – that of unrestricted submarine
warfare – the charges manifestly did overlap with Allied practice. Here, German
Admiral Karl Dönitz’s tu quoque defense was successful, leading to his acquittal,
though he was convicted on “counts...[of] crimes against peace and war crimes –
and sentenced to 10 years in prison.”
10
JUSTICE, TRUTH, REDRESS
364
For the Tokyo trials, the Allies did not prosecute Emperor Hirohito, the man who
“had personally approved all his country’s barbaric military ventures” before and
during the Second World War, and allowed him to stay on the Japanese throne.
11
Nor was Hirohito the only accused war criminal allowed to evade justice. The US
was particularly interested in military technology, including biological weapons.
Thus, Japanese scientists associated with the Unit 731 biological experiments – which
led, among other things, to the release of live plague bacilli over Chinese cities – were
granted immunity from prosecution, in return for sharing their research and expertise
with the Americans. In Europe, police and security forces were deemed vital to both
sides in the emerging Cold War struggle, regardless of the role they had played in
fascist persecutions. Soviet occupiers, for instance, incorporated Nazi-era personnel
wholesale into the new Stasi security force of East Germany.
The tribunals were victor’s justice, but they were also ground-breaking.
Nuremberg established “two central precedents: that of individual criminal respon-
sibility, and that of the universal jurisdiction over crimes against humanity.”
12
Out
JUSTICE, TRUTH, REDRESS
365
Figure 15.1 Judgment at Nuremberg, 1946: accused Nazi war criminals in the dock after the Second World War.
Source: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
of twenty-four indictments, two were dropped and three defendants acquitted;
another seven were imprisoned and not executed. (In the Tokyo proceedings, seven
defendants were sentenced to death, sixteen to life in prison, and two others to lighter
terms.) There is also no discounting the bonanza that the tribunals represented for
scholarship, and for the documentation of historical fact. Alan Bullock called
Nuremberg, with its bounty of Nazi documents on public display, “an absolutely
unqualified wonder...the greatest coup in history for historians.”
13
■
THE INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL TRIBUNALS:
■
YUGOSLAVIA AND RWANDA
It is one of history’s ironies that the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former
Yugoslavia (ICTY) was created to deflect accusations of Western complacency in the
face of genocide.
14
In spring 1992, with war raging in Bosnia, voices were raised for
the establishment of a UN-sponsored tribunal to try the perpetrators of atrocities.
In May 1993, the Security Council created the ICTY at The Hague (hence, “the
Hague tribunal”). For some time following, this was as far as the West was willing
to go. The Balkan wars continued for another three years, with the worst single atroc-
ity occurring near their end (the Srebrenica massacre of July 1995). The tribunal’s
creation did not prevent a recrudescence of conflict in Kosovo in 1998–99.
Following the Dayton Peace Accords of 1996, the ICTY process gradually began
to gather steam. The unwillingness of occupying forces to seize indicted individuals,
for fear of destabilizing the transition process, gave way to a more assertive attitude.
The pace of arrests and prosecutions picked up substantially. With growing cooper-
ation from Croatian authorities, more than half of the ICTY’s indicted figures were
in custody by 2001. The process climaxed with the extraordinary 2001 transfer of
former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic for prosecution by the tribunal.
15
The ICTY won praise for impartiality. Its first conviction was issued against a
Croatian (albeit one who served with Serb forces). The indictments of Croatian
General Ante Gotovina and Kosovo Prime Minister Ranush Haradinaj (see Chapter
8) helped to balance the emphasis on Serb crimes against Bosnian Muslims,
Croatians, and Kosovar Albanians. However, the ICTY was criticized for ruling out
war crimes prosecutions of NATO leaders of the Kosovo war, accused of attacks on
civilian targets and other breaches of international law.
16
With the Hague tribunal in place, the UN could hardly avoid establishing
a tribunal for the Rwanda genocide of 1994. The International Criminal Tribunal
for Rwanda (ICTR) was housed at Arusha, Tanzania, where the abortive 1993
peace agreements had been signed (Chapter 9). The ICTR’s gears ground painfully
slowly, however. Understaffed and underfunded, it remains prone to allegations that
it focuses exclusively on Hutu killers of Tutsis, with no consideration of Tutsi reprisal
killings of Hutus.
17
Its operations also appear distorted by the more extensive
genocide trials in Rwanda. These imposed the death penalty, while ICTR proceedings
did not, leading to the paradox that génocidaires could escape execution at the
ICTR, while their underlings could be (and were) sentenced to death by Rwandan
judges.
18
JUSTICE, TRUTH, REDRESS
366
The international tribunals at the Hague and Arusha are extremely important to
precedent-setting case law. In a few short years, the ICTY and ICTR together have
contributed more to legal interpretations and applications of the Genocide
Convention than all authorities in the preceding forty-five years. There follow some
examples.
Jurisdictional issues
For decades, applications of international humanitarian law were muddled by the
difficulty of determining which legal instruments could be imposed on sovereign
states, and when – in peacetime, or solely in war? In civil wars, or only international
ones? These matters are now largely resolved. In its “exhaustive analysis of customary
and conventional international humanitarian law,” the Hague tribunal concluded
by decisively “severing...the category of crimes against humanity [including geno-
cide] from any requirement of a connection to international wars, or indeed to
any state of conflict.”
19
In the estimation of scholar Christopher Rudolph, this ICTY
precedent “opened the door to international adjudication of internal conflicts.”
20
It
was seized upon by the Arusha tribunal in extending relevant international law to a
“civil conflict” (the Rwanda genocide). The precedent has become a touchstone for
advocates of universal jurisdiction in cases of genocide and other crimes against
humanity.
The concept of a victim group
Many have criticized the UN Genocide Convention’s exclusion of political and other
potential victim groups. Moreover, the four core groups that the Convention does
recognize – “national, ethnical, racial, and religious” – are notoriously difficult to
define. Confronted with genocide in Rwanda, where populations sharing most of
the usual ethnic markers – language, religion, a common history – descended into
savage intercommunal killing, the ICTR chose to define an ethnic group as “one
whose members share a common language and culture; or, a group which
distinguishes itself as such (self identification); or, a group identified as such by others,
including perpetrators of the crimes (identification by others).”
21
Identities may now be
imputed to a collectivity, as well as avowed by one.
Gender and genocide
According to Steven Ratner and Jason Abrams, the ICTY’s “indictments and juris-
prudence have highlighted the role of sexual violence in the Balkan conflict and more
clearly defined the status of such offenses in international criminal law.”
22
For
instance, in the Celibici case, the ICTY ruled that rape could constitute torture. The
ICTR went further still. With the Akayesu decision of 1998, the Arusha tribunal,
“in one of its significant innovations, defined rape as a form of genocide, in that it
JUSTICE, TRUTH, REDRESS
367
constitutes serious bodily or mental harm in accordance with article II(b) of the [UN]
Convention.”
23
Rape was also depicted as a form of “preventing births within the
group,” both physically and through inflicting psychological trauma on women.
24
From both perspectives, female rape victims are now viewed as victims in their own
right, rather than a medium through which dishonor and dislocation may be visited
upon a family or community. This new sensitivity reflects decades of successful
feminist mobilization around the issue of rape, including ground-breaking analyses
of rape in war and genocide.
25
Neither the ICTY nor the ICTR has accompanied these advances with systematic
attention to rape and sexual violence against males, especially in detention centers and
prison camps. The ICTY tribunal reacted with unease to forays on the subject, while
the ICTR has ignored it altogether.
26
However, the tribunals did make one essential
contribution to legal understandings of gendercidal atrocities against men. In 2001,
Bosnian Serb General Radislav Krstic became the first person to be convicted by the
ICTY of aiding and abetting genocide. Krstic’s lawyers had argued that because “only”
adult males were killed at Srebrenica, the strategy was not genocidal against the
community as a whole. In its 2004 verdict on Krstic’s appeal, the court rejected these
arguments, contending that selective killing of males constituted destruction of the
Bosnian-Muslim population “in part,” and this was sufficient to characterize the
slaughter as genocide.
27
■
NATIONAL TRIALS
Prosecution of genocide and other crimes at the national rather than international
level carries certain advantages. Mechanisms for indictment, prosecution, and
adjudication are already in place: this is a definitional feature of the modern state.
Moreover, in countries where genocide and crimes against humanity have been
committed, the matter is deeply personal:
Where trials take place in the country where the offenses occurred, the entire
process becomes more deeply connected with the society, providing it with the
potential to create a strong psychological and deterrent effect on the popula-
tion. This factor, combined with the greater access to evidence, witnesses, victims,
and perpetrators, gives such tribunals a significant potential advantage over
international tribunals.
28
Unfortunately, perpetration of genocide on a national territory often correlates with
underdeveloped and compromised legal institutions. Thus, the infrastructure for
administering justice may be sorely inadequate. In Ethiopia, for instance, President
Meles Zenawi’s government charged more than 5,000 representatives of the brutal
Dergue dictatorship with offenses that included crimes against humanity and
genocide; but these “highly ambitious” prosecutions suffered from a “judicial system
[that was] weak and lacking any tradition of independence.”
29
Rwanda’s formal post-
genocide trials, as distinct from the gacaca experiment (see below), aroused strong
international criticism for their selective and sometimes shambolic character.
JUSTICE, TRUTH, REDRESS
368
National trials can also arouse national sentiment, to the detriment of the
proceedings. This derailed the tribunals at Leipzig and Constantinople after the First
World War. Even contemporary, advanced legal systems may be unduly swayed by
such sentiment. Israel, for example, mishandled proceedings against John Demjanjuk,
a US citizen extradited on charges of having served as a brutal guard (“Ivan the
Terrible”) at the Treblinka death camp. According to Geoffrey Robertson, some
Israelis “wanted so badly to convict Demjanjuk that three experienced judges ignored
exculpatory evidence and presided over an outrageously unfair show trial,” sentencing
the prisoner to death. Only when incontrovertible proof of mistaken identity was
submitted at the appeal stage was Demjanjuk “grudgingly” cleared.
30
In addition to Ethiopia’s proceedings against the Dergue and Israel’s against
Demjanjuk, some major national trials for war crimes and crimes against humanity
include:
• Proceedings against thousands of accused war criminals in Germany after World
War Two, following on the Nuremberg tribunal but conducted by German
courts. Result: minimal “denazification,” with most former Nazi functionaries left
unprosecuted.
• Israel’s abduction and trial of leading Nazi bureaucrat Adolf Eichmann
(1960–61). Result: Eichmann’s conviction and execution (1962).
31
• Argentina’s prosecution and incarceration, in the mid-1980s, of leaders of the
former military junta (see Chapter 14). Result: five leaders convicted and jailed,
but pardoned several years later.
• Trials of accused génocidaires in Rwanda. Result: some trials and executions,
general chaos, and the introduction of less formal gacaca proceedings (see
below).
• A renewed round of trials in Germany in the 1990s, this time of former
communist functionaries in the East German government. Result: a handful of
convictions of low-level border guards; general impunity for higher-ups,
sometimes on health grounds.
Domestic legislation on genocide is sometimes intriguing for its application of the
UN Genocide Convention. Incorporation of the Convention into national law can
be restrictive, based on self-serving “reservations,” as with Canada’s strategy to avoid
mention or prosecution of genocide against native Canadians (see Chapter 14). But
domestic framings can also be expansive and inclusive, perhaps charting a course
for developments at the international level. This is especially notable in the case
of designated victim groups for genocide. Bangladesh – with memories of the 1971
genocide still fresh (Box 8a) – added political groups to the Convention definition,
as did Costa Rica in 1992 and Panama in 1993. Peru includes social groups, while
Finland adds “a comparable group of people” to the Convention’s core list of
collectivities.
32
Another distinctive example is Cambodia, where, in light of the
Khmer Rouge’s strategies, genocide was defined in a Decree Law of July 1979 as
including “planned massacres of groups of innocent people; expulsion of inhabitants
of cities and villages in order to concentrate them and force them to do hard labour
in conditions leading to their physical and mental destruction; wiping out religion;
JUSTICE, TRUTH, REDRESS
369
[and] destroying political, cultural and social structures and family and social
relations.”
33
The “mixed tribunals”: Cambodia and Sierra Leone
The tribunals agreed for Cambodia and the West African nation of Sierra Leone
provide an innovative “mixed” model that combines national and international
representation. The trend-setter is Cambodia, where the model emerged after hard
bargaining between the United Nations and the Cambodian government. The UN
– supported by human rights NGOs in Cambodia and abroad – declared the
country’s post-genocide legal system incapable of administering justice fairly.
Not only was the system ramshackle and underfunded, the argument ran, but it was
vulnerable to intervention and control by the authoritarian Hun Sen government.
Government representatives, by contrast, stressed the importance of homegrown
justice. After tortuous twists and turns a compromise was reached, and a UN–
Cambodia Agreement was signed in June 2003. According to Tom Fawthrop and
Helen Jarvis, the mixed tribunal “is a carefully crafted structure designed to provide
sufficient checks and balances. International jurists, lawyers and judges will occupy
key roles as the co-prosecutor, co-investigating judge and two out of five trial court
judges, and must be a party to conviction or exoneration of any accused.”
34
The trials
will be held in Cambodia, with a majority of Cambodian judges.
Although it took the Cambodian framework as its guide, the Special Court for
Sierra Leone was first off the ground. It, too, includes both national and foreign
justices, administering both domestic and international laws, with the national capital
(Freetown) hosting the proceedings. Nine individuals from both government militias
and RUF rebels stood trial for atrocities committed during a decade-long conflict that
killed 50,000 civilians and became a byword for “new war” savagery (see Chapter
12).
35
■
ANOTHER KIND OF JUSTICE: RWANDA’S
GACACA
EXPERIMENT
Among the glaring deficiencies of the ICTR in Arusha is that it will try just seventy
cases before it closes in 2008. Meanwhile, well over 100,000 detainees languished
for years, amidst squalid conditions, in Rwandan jails. Their incarceration was usually
based on genuine suspicion of involvement in the genocide; some accusations,
though, may have been concocted to settle personal scores or seize property. Clearly,
the country’s shattered legal system could never clear this backlog of tens of thousands
of cases.
The solution eventually settled upon was gacaca (ga-CHA-cha). The word means
“on the hilltop,” a reference to the open-air justice meted out by “260,000 lay judges
– old and young, men and women, Hutu and Tutsi,” elected by popular vote in
October 2001.
36
Gacaca tribunals are established at four levels, from cell through
sector and district to province. The lowest-level tribunal handles Category 4 offenses,
those against property only. Sector tribunals assess crimes involving injury, while
JUSTICE, TRUTH, REDRESS
370
district-level trials handle cases of killing but not the organization and direction of
killing (Category 1 crimes). These fall outside the gacaca framework, and will be
tried by government courts. Provincial tribunals serve as courts of final appeal for
gacaca cases.
37
At the trials, alleged victims and perpetrators are brought face to face, with
witnesses speaking for each. The goal is restorative justice. Sentences emphasize redress
through service to the community: “helping to build homes...maintaining green
spaces, repairing schools and hospitals, and performing agricultural work.” The
advantage is that this “provides at least a taste of justice for the victims, in addition
to rehabilitating offenders.”
38
Tutsi killers of Hutus during and after the genocide against Tutsis are not called
to account by gacaca. Moreover, there is little in the way of Western-style judicial
safeguards – no presumption of innocence, no defense lawyers, and “low standards
of evidence,” leaving “ample room for manipulation and corruption.”
39
Despite these
deficiencies, gacaca seems an inspired indigenous response to an enormous challenge
– administering justice in a post-genocidal society with scant resources. In 2005,
thousands of gacaca courts began to function, with the ambitious goal of trying
110,000 cases by 2008.
■
THE PINOCHET CASE
General Augusto Pinochet was first among equals in the military junta that overthrew
the elected regime of Salvador Allende in Chile on September 11, 1973.
40
The coup
was followed by a campaign against the Left, in which several thousand Chileans died.
Many more were scarred physically and psychologically by torture, and tens of
thousands forced into exile. Activists who fled one Southern Cone* country for refuge
in another were hunted down and murdered in death-squad operations coordinated
jointly by the region’s dictators, Pinochet included.
In 1974, Pinochet appointed himself president. Repression, torture, and death-
squad activity continued, albeit on a reduced scale. In 1989, confident that his
free-market reforms and social conservatism would sway a majority of Chileans,
Pinochet submitted to a plebiscite. A majority – though not a large one – rejected
him. Pinochet duly left office in 1990, and a centrist government took power.
Pinochet lived on, wealthy and comfortable except for persistent back problems.
In search of relief, he consulted physicians in London, where the former Conservative
Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, was his regular visitor; she had staunchly backed
Pinochet during her years in power. For its part, the Blair government dispatched
Foreign Office staff to attend to the aging dictator’s needs and concerns.
Press reports had alerted Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón to Pinochet’s presence in
Britain. In October 1998, Garzón procured a warrant for Pinochet’s extradition.
The former dictator, aware that legal proceedings were afoot, was preparing to flee
JUSTICE, TRUTH, REDRESS
371
* The “Southern Cone” of South America consists of Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay.
when police detained him. He would remain under house arrest while the British
considered Garzón’s extradition request.
On March 24, 1999, the same day that NATO bombs began falling on Kosovo
(Chapter 8), a panel of the House of Lords – the supreme British tribunal – voted
6-1 that norms of diplomatic immunity did not extend to Pinochet in his current
situation.
41
British domestic opinion was divided over the detention and extradition
request, however, with Lady Thatcher leading the chorus of protest. In the end,
realpolitik (“reality politics”) won out. In March 2000, a year-and-a-half after
Pinochet’s arrest, UK Home Secretary Jack Straw released him by government fiat, on
“compassionate” grounds.
42
This seemed an abortive conclusion to the drama. Nonetheless, the Pinochet case
was recognized as a watershed in international humanitarian law. For the first time
since the legally ambiguous Eichmann case,
43
a former leadership figure, accused of
committing grave abuses in one state (but not of war crimes per se), was detained in
another state for possible extradition to a third. Considerations of sovereign immunity
were no longer determinant. As one of the British Law Lords wrote: “The trend was
clear. War crimes had been replaced by crimes against humanity. The way in which
a state treated its own citizens within its own borders had become a matter of
legitimate concern to the international community.”
44
In a neat example of a political “feedback loop,” international legal proceedings
against Pinochet impacted upon the Chilean domestic agenda.
45
In closing his 2000
account of the Pinochet case, Geoffrey Robertson opined that Pinochet was “as likely
to go to trial [in Chile] . . . as he is to heaven.”
46
But in 2004, the Chilean Supreme
Court suddenly declared Pinochet fit to stand trial, at age 89, for murders committed
under his aegis. Shortly after the renewed legal process was announced, Pinochet
entered hospital with a supposed “stroke.” The Supreme Court was unimpressed. In
the first days of January 2005, it reiterated that the process should go ahead, and
placed the former dictator under house arrest.
47
In September 2005, Pinochet was
formally stripped of his immunity from prosecution.
48
Impunity for Pinochet’s
colleagues and underlings had also evaporated, with “more than 300 retired officers,
including 21 generals . . . in jail or facing charges.”
49
Where would it all end? In the wake of the Pinochet case (and Yugoslavia’s
surrender of Slobodan Milosevic to The Hague shortly thereafter), a certain
nervousness attended the travel arrangements of despots and their henchmen
worldwide.
50
Cuban President Fidel Castro allegedly “cancelled at least two trips
out of Cuba, apparently fearing he could be arrested on US criminal charges.” The
former chief of Ethiopia’s Dergue regime, Mengistu Haile Mariam, “faced an arrest
threat in South Africa while receiving medical treatment there, causing him to return
to safer exile in Zimbabwe.”
51
Not even leaders of the self-proclaimed “world’s greatest
democracy” were safe. In late 2004, a Canadian group, Lawyers Against the War,
sought unsuccessfully to have US President George W. Bush declared persona non
grata prior to a state visit to Canada, on the basis of his alleged “grave crimes against
humanity and war crimes” in Iraq.
52
In Germany soon afterwards, the Center for
Constitutional Rights, based in New York, “filed a complaint . . . with the Federal
German Prosecutor’s Office against [US Defense Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld
accusing him of war crimes and torture in connection with detainee abuses at Iraq’s
JUSTICE, TRUTH, REDRESS
372
Abu Ghraib prison.”
53
As a result, Rumsfeld hedged on attending a conference in
Germany in February 2005, until the German government guaranteed that he would
not face arrest.
54
■
THE INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL COURT (ICC)
Implicit within the logic of the term “crime against humanity” is the need for an
international court.
David Hirsh
The concept of a permanent international tribunal for war crimes and crimes against
humanity is a venerable one. According to legal scholar William Schabas, Gustav
Moynier of the Red Cross outlined an early plan in the 1870s.
55
But for most of the
twentieth century, the one court with a claim to global jurisdiction – the International
Court of Justice (ICJ) at the Hague, also known as the World Court – was limited
mostly to territorial claims and resource disputes. When Nicaragua launched
proceedings against the US in the 1980s for acts of material sabotage and support
for contra rebels, the US at first argued that the ICJ lacked jurisdiction. When the
ICJ begged to differ, the US withdrew from the proceedings and refused to abide
by any judgment against it. The ICJ ruled in Nicaragua’s favor, but was impotent
to enforce its decision. “A court with teeth” in the humanitarian and human rights
arena existed only in the Western European regional context: the European Court
of Justice’s decisions are binding upon all European Union members. However, the
mounting impetus for a global prohibition regime against genocide, war crimes, and
crimes against humanity led, in 1994, to the UN drafting a statute for a legal body
along the lines of the Yugoslavia tribunal, but with global jurisdiction. A final version
was drafted in Rome, with the “Rome Statute” passed on July 17, 1998. In April
2002, sixty-six countries – six more than required – voted to adopt the Statute, and
it entered formally into force. By early 2005, 139 countries had signed the Statute,
with ninety-seven “state parties” (those who had ratified it in national legislatures).
Eighteen judges, including seven women, were appointed, and Luis Moreno Ocampo
was selected as the first independent prosecutor. Notably, Moreno Ocampo first came
to prominence through his prosecution of former junta leaders in Argentina.
The court is envisaged as an adjunct to legal proceedings at the national level.
Only when national mechanisms prove incapable of handling a case can the
ICC come into play. Individuals from states who are not signatories to the Rome
Statute may still be tried, though only if referred to the Court by a signatory state.
In general, ICC proceedings are to be activated only by a request from a member
state, though some loopholes do exist. The independent prosecutor can initiate
investigations on his or her own (proprio motu), while the UN Security Council may
command the prosecutor to apply the court’s jurisdiction even if s/he is reluctant to
do so. A Pre-Trial Chamber will then issue warrants for the arrest of indicted
individuals (it is individuals, not states or other entities, that are the focus of the ICC’s
operations).
JUSTICE, TRUTH, REDRESS
373
The Court’s mandate extends to genocide, war crimes, crimes of “aggression,” and
crimes against humanity. The definition of “genocide” adopted by the ICC is identical
to that of the UN Convention. Worth citing is the definition of “crimes against
humanity” in the Rome Statute, since this category of crimes is more likely to feature
in ICC deliberations than genocide per se.
56
This category also encompasses acts that
overlap with the Genocide Convention,
57
and others that fall under some scholars’
preferred definitions of genocide, including my own.
58
Crimes against humanity
comprise:
JUSTICE, TRUTH, REDRESS
374
Figure 15.2 Luis Moreno
Ocampo, prosecutor of
Argentine war criminals,
appointed as the first prosecutor
of the International Criminal
Court (ICC).
Source: United Nations.
any of the following acts when committed as part of a widespread or systematic
attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack:
(a) Murder; (b) Extermination; (c) Enslavement; (d) Deportation or forcible
transfer of population; (e) Imprisonment or other severe deprivation of physical
liberty in violation of fundamental rules of international law; (f ) Torture; (g) Rape,
sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, forced pregnancy, enforced sterilization,
or any other form of sexual violence of comparable gravity; (h) Persecution
against any identifiable group or collectivity on political, racial, national, ethnic,
cultural, religious, gender...or other grounds that are universally recognized as
impermissible under international law...(i) Enforced disappearance of persons;
(j) The crime of apartheid; (k) Other inhumane acts of a similar character
intentionally causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or to mental or
physical health.
Despite the broad international consensus behind the ICC, many governments,
including the US, have shied away from it. The Clinton government signed the Rome
Statute in the knowledge that it was unlikely to be ratified by Congress.
59
The issue
of universal jurisdiction, along with the semi-independent role of the prosecutor, were
key sticking points. In May 2002, the Bush administration renounced the treaty,
and declared that it would not tolerate the detention or trial of any US national by
the ICC. Later the same year, Bush signed into law the “American Servicemembers
Protection Act,” authorizing the US president “to use all means . . . necessary to bring
about the release of covered US persons and covered allied persons held captive by
or on behalf of the [ICC].”
60
Wags referred to this as the “Invade the Hague Act,”
conjuring images of US troops descending on Dutch detention centers to free
Americans accused of abuses and atrocities.
The ICC is “the body that may ultimately play the greatest role in interpreting
the prohibition against genocide.”
61
At the time of writing, though, “its power as
part of the atrocities [prohibition] regime remains contested and indefinite.”
62
Its
broad mandate and intended permanence bode well, as does its popularity in most
countries of the world. On the other hand, concessions made to placate US and other
concerns (including an opt-out clause lasting fully seven years) evoked concern that
the ICC might become just another toothless legal body.
■
INTERNATIONAL CITIZENS’ TRIBUNALS
Often called “international people’s tribunals,” these bodies substitute accusations
and public shaming for due process and enforcement. The formation of a citizens’
tribunal implies that regular means of justice are inadequate – corrupt or compro-
mised. “The people” – certain interested people – seize the initiative and stage a quasi-
trial. This may publicize atrocities, raise public consciousness, or shatter taboos, for
example about Western state involvement. (It is Western democracies that are usually
both hosts and subjects of such proceedings.) Tribunals can place vital evidence on
the public record, and point to gaps between legislation and its application, high-
lighting the immunity often extended to sovereign states and their representatives.
JUSTICE, TRUTH, REDRESS
375
Citizens’ tribunals receive a rare comparative analysis in a book by Arthur
and Judith Klinghoffer.
63
The authors point out that, in many ways, the most remark-
able and successful citizens’ tribunal was the first. In February 1933, the month after
Adolf Hitler came to power, the Reichstag Parliament building in Berlin was burned
down. Three foreign and one German communist, along with the Dutchman
Marinus van der Lubbe, were charged with the crime. The Nazis seized on the fire
to declare a state of emergency, suspend the Weimar constitution, and begin their
mass round-ups of communist suspects (Box 6a). Fearing that the German courts
were too cowed to try the matter fairly, various public intellectuals, along with
prominent socialists and communists, convened “The Commission of Inquiry
into the Origins of the Reichstag Fire” in London in September 1933. Held a week
before official proceedings were due to get underway in Germany, the tribunal pulled
the rug out from the Nazis’ planned show-trial. Placed in the hot seat by interna-
tional media attention, a court in Leipzig convicted only van der Lubbe (he was
subsequently executed). The four communists were acquitted. “The first international
citizens’ tribunal had taken on Nazi Germany, and had won,” writes Arthur
Klinghoffer. “Intellectuals had confronted a totalitarian state, and had successfully
used public opinion as a weapon to further their cause.”
64
Four years later, supporters of exiled Russian communist Leon Trotsky organized
a citizens’ tribunal at his new (and final) home in Coyoacán, a Mexico City suburb.
The intent of the Dewey Commission, chaired by the eponymous philosopher, was
to denounce Soviet show-trials and accusations against Trotsky. The tribunal achieved
some success in countering Stalinist propaganda, although its geographic remove
from centers of Western public opinion limited its impact.
Much more visible was the International War Crimes Tribunal to judge US actions
in the Vietnam War in 1967, known as the Russell Tribunal. Tribunal delegates voted
unanimously that US actions did constitute genocide against the Vietnamese and
other Indochinese peoples (for more on the US war against Vietnam, see Chapter
2). However, “this decision on genocide had little impact on the American public
and was generally viewed by the press as verbal excess.”
65
Since the 1970s, tribunals have publicized the restitution claims of indigenous
peoples; the Japanese “comfort women” issue; Western wars and sanctions against
Iraq;
66
and the social damage associated with neoliberal economic measures imposed
by the First World on the Third. As these examples suggest, “In essence, tribunals have
become a weapon of the radical left in its battle with ‘global capitalism’.”
67
It has been argued that “these tribunals do make some contribution to the pathet-
ically limited possibilities of action for the punishment of genocide.”
68
However,
many observers consider them to be kangaroo courts: their “investigations sometimes
seem perfunctory, and the verdict seems preordained,” in Leo Kuper’s words.
69
Richard Falk referred to the Russell Tribunal as “a juridical farce.”
70
Law Professor
Peter Burns likewise argues that “the desired conclusion[s]” of such tribunals are
“inextricably woven into the accusations and process itself.” He considers them to
be “a form of overt morality play, relying upon polemic and theatre to achieve results
that may be desirable ethically, but may or may not be desirable legally.”
71
JUSTICE, TRUTH, REDRESS
376
■
TRUTH AND RECONCILIATION
Like gacaca in Rwanda, truth and reconciliation commissions are driven by a vision
of restorative justice that “seeks repair of social connections and peace rather than
retribution against the offenders.” As such, these commissions have become the
preferred option for societies (or their decision-makers) who wish to avoid arduous
and possibly destabilizing criminal trials. For victims, such commissions provide
a forum, perhaps the first they have had, for speaking of the horrors inflicted upon
them or upon those whom they loved. Ideally, the result is catharsis – in this context,
the mastering of one’s pain through its articulation. “By confronting the past, the
traumatized individuals can learn to distinguish past, present, and future. When the
work of knowing and telling the story has come to an end, the trauma then belongs
to the past; the survivor can face the work of building a future.”
72
Validation may
also lie in having one’s testimony heard, corroborated, and integrated into a
commission’s published findings. A degree of moral order is restored to the world
when one’s suffering is taken seriously, and its perpetrators are viewed with obloquy.
(Truth-telling may have a darker side, however, considered below.)
Some of the key questions for truth commissions are the following. How long
will the commission operate for? The general trend is from a few months to a couple
of years. Who will fund it? Significant resources may be available domestically, as
in South Africa. In other cases foreign funding is crucial, and in a pair of instances
the UN has played a formative role (El Salvador) or a prominent one (Guatemala).
Who will staff the commission? The emphasis has been on prominent public figures
from the country in question, widely seen as fair-minded and/or compassionate.
Will the commission examine alleged abuses by all sides in a given conflict, or one side
only? The strong tendency has been towards examining all sides’ conduct, since this
greatly bolsters the credibility of the commission’s procedures and final report.
Will the commission have the power to dispense justice and grant amnesty? Justice, no;
and only South Africa’s commission could grant amnesty to those who confessed
before it.
In conducting its operations, how will the commission elicit testimony? Sessions
may be held in public or behind closed doors. Anonymous testimony might be
permitted, especially in the case of sexual crimes. What standard of evidence will be
required to draw publishable conclusions? According to Hayner, the trend is towards
“the ‘balance of probabilities’ standard for basic conclusions of fact. This...suggests
that there is more evidence to support than to deny a conclusion, or that something
is more likely to be true than not based on the evidence before the commission.”
73
Will the commission’s report include prescriptions and recommendations? In general, yes.
Special attention is often paid to reforming the state security forces. Commissions
may also provide critical documentation for subsequent criminal trials. Will the
commission name names? More rarely.
74
There is a delicate balance to be struck between
holding individuals accountable while risking (1) overturning the applecart of a
delicate political transition, or (2) provoking threats and acts of violence against
witnesses and commission staff. The UN-sponsored commission in El Salvador
did name names, despite intense opposition from the Salvadoran government and
military. The Guatemalan commission, by contrast, chose not to, though it left no
JUSTICE, TRUTH, REDRESS
377
doubt that state agents had committed the overwhelming majority of the atrocities
(see Chapter 3).
Will truth commissions consider the roles of foreign actors? Generally not, though
when such investigations are conducted, they may be revelatory. The 1992 report
of the Chad truth commission, for example, produced a hard-hitting assessment of
US aid to the goons of the Habré regime. The US also came under close scrutiny
by the Guatemalan Commission for Historical Clarification. The commission
obtained extensive documentation of the US role in overthrowing a democratic
government in Guatemala (1954), then installing and sustaining the military
dictators who eventually turned to full-scale genocide against Mayan Indians and
domestic dissenters.
However, “most truth commissions have not investigated this international role
at any depth; few have addressed the issue at all in their final report.”
75
This reflects
material and evidentiary constraints, as well as the complexity of some international
involvements. (One balks at assessing the international dimension of the Congo
conflict, for example, if a truth commission is ever struck with this mandate.)
Sometimes the reluctance may derive from practical considerations. Many truth
commissions, as noted, rely on international financial support – frequently from the
United States.
Truth commissions resemble citizens’ tribunals in compensating for a lack of
“teeth” in their deliberations by creating ripples in the public sphere. In the
commissions’ case, this can produce a kind of quasi-legal sanction against offenders.
Some of those named by commissions may avoid foreign travel, fearing arrest. At a
more informal level, Hayner has vividly described the treatment accorded to leaders
and high-profile agents of the former junta in Argentina. Many were never formally
tried; some were jailed but released under an amnesty. Nevertheless, the revelation
of their deeds, primarily through the Argentine truth commission and its Nunca Más
report, carried lasting consequences for these individuals. “Whenever they venture
into the streets or public places, [Generals] Videla, Massera, Camps, and several others
have experienced spontaneous though nonviolent acts of repudiation: waiters refuse
to serve them, other patrons leave the place or sit far away from them, some actually
defy their bodyguards and confront them with the opinion that most Argentines have
of them.”
76
A question remains: Is the truth always desirable? In personal terms, truth-telling
about atrocity is often deeply traumatizing for the teller. Yael Fischman and Jaime
Ross describe the “recurring themes” of torture survivors in therapy:
fear of destroying others, such as relatives and therapists, by relating the trauma;
fear of loss of control over feelings of rage, violence, and anxiety; shame and rage
over the vulnerability and helplessness evoked by torture; rage and grief at the
sudden and arbitrary disruption of individual, social, and political projects, and
at the violation of rights; guilt and shame over surviving and being unable to save
others; guilt over bringing distress on self and family and over not protecting them
. . . fear and rage at the unpredictability of and lack of control over events; grief
over the loss of significant others, through both death and exile; and loss of aspects
of the self, such as trust and innocence.
77
JUSTICE, TRUTH, REDRESS
378
Outside the formal therapeutic environment, though, almost no mechanism to elicit
truth-telling – be it a truth commission, a human rights investigator, or a journalist
– provides meaningful follow-up to traumatized survivors. Truth-divulging may
also be “dangerous and destabilizing” on a national level, according to Hayner,
“disrupt[ing] fragile relationships in local communities recently returned to peace.”
78
She cites Mozambique, where “people across the political spectrum, including
victims, academics, government officials and others . . . said, ‘No, we do not want
to reenter into this morass of conflict, hatred, and pain. We want to focus on the
future. . . . We prefer silence over confrontation, over renewed pain. While we cannot
forget, we would like to pretend that we can.’”
79
These attitudes were not ostrich-like. Rather, they signaled a process of peace
and reconciliation that had come about “remarkably quickly” in Mozambique,
many observers describing it “with a sense of wonder.” From the day a peace
agreement was signed ending one of Africa’s most brutal twentieth-century wars,
“the former warring enemies have lived in peace virtually without incident.” Rituals
of purification and reconciliation were performed at the village level, beyond the
reach of state initiatives.
80
“We were all thinking about how to increase peace and
reconciliation,” said one Mozambican official, “but when we came to the grassroots,
they were reconciling already. Our ideas were only confusing and stirring up
trouble.”
81
■
THE CHALLENGE OF REDRESS
• Switzerland, March 1995. In a declaration that the London Times described as
“visionary,” the government announced the creation of a $5 billion humanitarian
fund “to be dispensed to [Jewish] Holocaust victims who lost their money in Swiss
banks and, further, to amend historical injustice worldwide.” The announce-
ment came after decades of stonewalling by banks about accounts deposited by
European Jews who were later killed in the Holocaust. The banking system had
been “geared to plunder and profit from unclaimed accounts,” using the money
“to facilitate Swiss business deals with Eastern Europe.” Only after a sustained
campaign by the World Jewish Congress, headed by Canadian businessman Edgar
Bronfman, were the banks persuaded that redress was in order. This took the
form of direct payments to thousands of descendants of Jewish depositors, as well
as a wider aid initiative aimed at bolstering human rights and preventing future
holocausts. By December 1997, forty-one countries were participating in a
conference aimed at “making amends for participation in, or profit from, Nazi
plunder.”
82
• Durban, South Africa, September 2002. The UN-sponsored World Conference
against Racism issued a final declaration calling for redress for the damage inflicted
on African peoples by the scourge of slavery, together with other “historical
injustices [that] have undeniably contributed to poverty, underdevelopment,
marginalisation, social exclusion, [and] economic disparities.” Proposed “in
a spirit of solidarity” were measures including “debt relief, “promotion of foreign
direct investment,” “market access,” “infrastructure development,” “human
JUSTICE, TRUTH, REDRESS
379
resource development,” and “education, training and cultural development.”
83
In
the same year, the Apartheid Debt and Reparations Campaign in the US launched
a lawsuit in New York targeting “banks and other companies in six Western
countries, seeking redress for ‘aiding and abetting a crime against humanity.’”
84
The city of Liverpool in the United Kingdom issued “an unreserved apology for
the city’s involvement in the slave trade,” recognizing its “untold misery” and its
destructive impact on “Black people in Liverpool today.”
85
• Scotland/New Zealand, January 2005. The Perth Museum announced the return
to New Zealand of two tattooed Maori heads – toi moko – taken as curiosities by
a Scottish ship’s surgeon in 1822. The decision followed a formal request for
repatriation issued by the Te Papa National Museum in Wellington.
86
Te Papa
planned to store the heads, and more than fifty others, in a special section for wahi
tapu artifacts. These were defined as “sites and places sacred to Maori people in
the traditional, religious, ritual or mythological sense.”
87
The events exemplified
a growing trend for human remains seized in colonial times to be treated with
respect, as opposed to derision or clinical disregard. Frequently, where remains are
held in foreign collections as relics or cultural curiosities, they are repatriated,
often with an accompanying burial ceremony.
These three vignettes bear upon the central issue of redress for past atrocities and
abuses. The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines redress as to “set right, remedy, make
up for, get rid of, rectify . . . [a] distress, wrong, damage, grievance, [or] abuse.” Colin
Tatz, summarizing the arguments of Mari Matsuda, cites “five prerequisites for a
meritorious claim for redress: a ‘human injustice’ must have been committed; it must
be well-documented; the victims must be identifiable as a distinct group; the current
members of the group must continue to suffer harm; and such harm must be causally
connected to the past injustice.”
88
Forms of redress are numerous, and sometimes amorphous. Penalties imposed by
official tribunals, such as the ICTR and ICTY, certainly qualify, as do the decisions
of less formal processes (such as gacaca in Rwanda). The healing that ideally accom-
panies truth commissions and formal acts of reconciliation may also constitute
redress. Compensation is a regular feature: it can take the form of monetary payments
(as in the Swiss case), territorial agreements, restitution of property or cultural objects
(like the Maori heads), profits from exploitation of natural resources, and affirmative
action policies in public and private sector employment (such as in South Africa after
1994).
A critical role may be played by formal apologies. Martha Minow emphasizes “the
communal nature of the process of apologizing,” which “requires communication
between a wrongdoer and a victim. . . . The methods for offering and accepting an
apology both reflect and help to constitute a moral community.”
89
Memorable
apologies include:
• German Chancellor Willi Brandt’s Kniefall (kneeling apology) at a Polish war
memorial in 1970.
• Queen Elizabeth’s 1995 mea culpa to New Zealand Maoris for British viola-
tion of the Waitingi Treaty of 1840: “The Crown expresses its profound regret
JUSTICE, TRUTH, REDRESS
380
and apologizes unreservedly for the loss of lives because of hostilities arising
from this invasion and at the devastation of property and social life which
resulted.”
90
• The annual “Sorry Day,” instituted by white Australians after the publication of
Bringing Them Home, the report of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
Commission (Chapter 3). This popular form of apology contrasted sharply with
the government’s reaction to the report, which expressed only “regret” for past
treatment of Aborigines.
91
• President Bill Clinton’s 1998 apology at Kigali airport for Western inaction during
the genocide in Rwanda.
92
• The 2004 apology by Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul, Germany’s development aid
minister, to Namibian Hereros for “atrocities . . . [that] would have been termed
genocide” (Chapter 3).
The danger is that apology may provide a cheap substitute for genuine redress. Does
it not “merely whitewash the injustice?” wonders Elazar Barkan.
93
However, apologies
may also be the entrée to significant material compensation and institutional
transformation. A US congressional apology to Japanese Americans for their intern-
ment during the Second World War came as part of a Civil Liberties Act, under which
the US government paid out 80,000 claims worth $1.6 billion, in addition to opening
a Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles. Queen Elizabeth’s declaration
to the Maoris was accompanied by a substantial land settlement and the granting of
extensive fishing rights to Maoris. Profits from these sources “within a few years...
became a significant source of Maori income.”
94
In Canada, a Royal Commission
on Aboriginal Peoples acknowledged in 1996 that “great wrongs have been done” to
Native Indians. This half-apology was followed by the allotting of hundreds of
millions of dollars “to community-based healing initiatives for victims” of the
residential school system (see Chapter 3); the designation of Indians as “first nations”
(as in the US); and the creation in April 1999 of a new territory, Nunavut, for
northern Inuit peoples, with a concomitant share of profits from the land’s abundant
natural resources.
95
By contrast, a failure or refusal to apologize signifies a continuing intransigence
towards material and institutional forms of redress. Notorious non-apologies of recent
times include Turkey’s for the genocide against Armenians; nations of the Americas
for the crimes of Atlantic slavery; and Central European countries for the mass
expulsion of ethnic Germans at the end of the Second World War and after.
96
Nonetheless, the apologetic trend prevails, suggesting a strengthing of the humani-
tarian regime first forged in the mid-nineteenth century.
■
FURTHER STUDY
Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.New York:
The Viking Press, 1965. Arendt’s controversial account of the trial in Israel of
Adolf Eichmann, the ultimate bureaucratic killer.
Elazar Barkan, The Guilt of Nations: Restitution and Negotiating Historical Injustices.
JUSTICE, TRUTH, REDRESS
381
New York: W.W. Norton, 2001. Wide-ranging overview of contemporary forms
of redress.
Roy Gutman and David Rieff, Crimes of War: What the Public Should Know.New
York: W.W. Norton, 1999. Richly (sometimes disturbingly) illustrated
encyclopedia.
Priscilla B. Hayner, Unspeakable Truths: Confronting State Terror and Atrocity.New
York: Routledge, 2001. Energetic insider account of truth commissions.
David Hirsh, Law against Genocide: Cosmopolitan Trials. London: Glasshouse Press,
2003. Moderately helpful study, focusing on four recent trials related to genocide
and crimes against humanity.
Martha Minow, Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History after Genocide and
Mass Violence. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1998. A good introduction to truth
and redress.
Nunca Más: The Report of the Argentine National Commission on the Disappeared.
New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1986; Spanish edition online at http://www.
nuncamas.org/index.htm. The ground-breaking investigation of crimes by the
Argentine military junta (1976–83).
Steven R. Ratner and Jason S. Abrams, Accountability for Human Rights Atrocities in
International Law: Beyond the Nuremberg Legacy (2nd edn). Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2001. Best read alongside Schabas (see below), with a useful
Cambodia case study.
W. Michael Reisman and Chris T. Antoniou, eds, The Laws of War: A Comprehensive
Collection of Primary Documents on International Laws Governing Armed Conflict.
New York: Vintage, 1994. Core texts with commentary.
Geoffrey Robertson, Crimes against Humanity: The Struggle for Global Justice.New
York: The New Press, 2000. Thin on genocide, but elegantly written and
bracingly opinionated.
William A. Schabas, Genocide in International Law: The Crime of Crimes. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000. Dry, and prohibitively expensive, but an
indispensable reference work.
Sarah B. Sewall and Carl Kaysen, eds, The United States and the International
Criminal Court: National Security and International Law. Lanham, MD:
Rowman & Littlefield, 2000. Essays analyzing the ICC initiative in historical
context.
■
NOTES
1 William A. Schabas, Genocide in International Law: The Crime of Crimes (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 354. Some examples of crimes that command
universal jurisdiction are “hijacking and other threats to air travel, piracy, attacks upon
diplomats, [threats to] nuclear safety, terrorism, apartheid and torture.”
2 Schabas, Genocide in International Law, p. 341.
3 Gladstone quoted in Gary Jonathan Bass, Stay the Hand of Vengeance: The Politics of War
Crimes Tribunals (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 33; emphasis
added.
4 The official names of the tribunals were the International Military Tribunal (Nuremberg,
created in August 1945) and the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (Tokyo,
JUSTICE, TRUTH, REDRESS
382
created in January 1946). For more on the tribunals, see Joseph E. Persico, Nuremberg:
Infamy on Trial (London: Penguin, 1995), and Arnold C. Brackman, The Other
Nuremberg: The Untold Story of the Tokyo War Crimes Trials (New York: William
Morrow, 1987).
5 See Richard Overy, “Making Justice at Nuremberg, 1945–1946,” http://www.bbc.
co.uk/history/war/wwtwo/war_crimes_trials_01.shtml.
6 Samantha Power, “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide (New York:
Basic Books, 2002), p. 50 (quoting the Nuremberg indictments). Although their trials
received far less public attention than did those of the top Nazi leaders, Nuremberg also
tried members of the Einsatzgruppen killing squads who rampaged through Polish and
Soviet territories in 1941–42. These defendants “had been directly involved in the
supervision and implementation of mass murder, war crimes, and genocide. Of the
twenty-four accused, twenty-one were sentenced. Among those, two commanders, ten
leaders, and two officers were sentenced to death.” James Waller, Becoming Evil: How
Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2002), p. 92.
7 “Genocide was mentioned at Nuremberg, but was not included in the charges against the
defendants and was not an operative legal concept.” Arthur Jay Klinghoffer and Judith
Klinghoffer, International Citizens’ Tribunals: Mobilizing Public Opinion to Advance
Human Rights (New York: Palgrave, 2002), p. 195 (n. 5).
8 Steven R. Ratner and Jason S. Abrams, Accountability for Human Rights Atrocities in
International Law: Beyond the Nuremberg Legacy (2nd edn) (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2001), p. 22. Martha Minow points out that “no prior law made it clear that
individuals could be charged with the crime of waging aggressive war; the same held true
for crimes against humanity, including murder, extermination, enslavement, and perse-
cution on the basis of views or identities.” Minow, Between Vengeance and Forgiveness:
Facing History after Genocide and Mass Violence (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1998), p. 33.
9 Geoffrey Robertson, Crimes against Humanity: The Struggle for Global Justice (New York:
The New Press, 2000), p. 224.
10 David Hirsh, Law against Genocide: Cosmopolitan Trials (London: Glasshouse Press,
2003), p. 42.
11 Robertson, Crimes against Humanity, p. 222.
12 Hirsh, Law against Genocide, p. xvi.
13 Bullock quoted in Richard J. Goldstone and Gary Jonathan Bass, “Lessons from the
International Criminal Tribunals,” in Sarah B. Sewall and Carl Kaysen, eds, The United
States and the International Criminal Court: National Security and International Law
(Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), p. 54.
14 Bass writes that the ICTY “was an act of tokenism by the world community, which was
largely unwilling to intervene in ex-Yugoslavia but did not mind creating an institution
that would give the appearance of moral concern.” Bass, Stay the Hand of Vengeance,
p. 214.
15 By one recent count, the ICTY had issued eighty public indictments, with a number of
others kept under seal. Forty-nine indicted people were in detention at The Hague, with
another thirty-one at large. Eleven convictions had been issued and fifteen cases were on
appeal. Anne E. Mahle, “The Ad Hoc Criminal Tribunals for the Former Yugoslavia and
Rwanda,” http://www.pbs.org/wnet/justice/world_issues_hag.html.
16 For a nuanced examination, see David Bruce MacDonald, “The Fire in 1999?
The United States, NATO and the Bombing of Yugoslavia,” ch. 16 in Adam Jones, ed.,
Genocide, War Crimes and the West: History and Complicity (London: Zed Books, 2004),
pp. 276–98.
17 Rory Carroll, “Genocide Tribunal ‘Ignoring Tutsi Crimes,’” Guardian, January 13, 2005.
“A former prosecutor, Carla del Ponte, promised to charge members of the RPF [the
Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front] but before doing so she was removed from her post
by a unanimous vote in the UN security council in August 2003. Her successor, Hassan
Bubacar Jallow, showed no such zeal.”
JUSTICE, TRUTH, REDRESS
383
18 See Minow, Between Vengeance and Forgiveness, p. 41. As of April 2004, the ICTR had
completed nine cases (including appeal stages) with twelve cases being tried or pending
appeal. Ten defendants were “sentenced to life imprisonment, three were acquitted, while
the rest received different jail terms ranging from 10 to 35 years. Out of the 12 cases
pending appeal, two of them have been acquitted at the trial stage.” Twenty-three
defendants were in custody awaiting trial. Fondation Hirondelle, “ICTR/Genocide/
Commemoration – Basic Facts on the ICTR,” http://www.hirondelle.org/hirondelle.
nsf/0/d5df8df93c71b8aac1256e69004c22ce?OpenDocument.
19 Robertson, Crimes against Humanity, p. 296; emphasis added.
20 Christopher Rudolph, “Constructing an Atrocities Regime: The Politics of War Crimes
Tribunals,” International Organization, 55: 3 (Summer 2001), p. 667.
21 Yusuf Aksar, “The ‘Victimized Group’ Concept in the Genocide Convention and the
Development of International Humanitarian Law through the Practice of Ad Hoc
Tribunals,” Journal of Genocide Research, 5: 2 (2003), p. 217; emphasis added.
22 Ratner and Abrams, Accountability for Human Rights Atrocities, p. 201.
23 Schabas, Genocide in International Law, p. 384.
24 Schabas, Genocide in International Law, p. 174.
25 See, e.g., Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (New York:
Bantam, 1975); Alexandra Stiglmayer, ed., Mass Rape: The War against Women in Bosnia-
Herzegovina (Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1994).
26 See Augusta Del Zotto and Adam Jones, “Male-on-male Sexual Violence in Wartime:
Human Rights’ Last Taboo?,” paper presented to the Annual Convention of the
International Studies Association (ISA), New Orleans, LA, March 23–27, 2002.
Available at http://adamjones.freeservers.com/malerape.htm.
27 Judge Meron stated: “By seeking to eliminate a part of the Bosnian Muslims, the Bosnian
Serb forces committed genocide. They targeted for extinction the 40,000 Bosnian
Muslims living in Srebrenica, a group which was emblematic of the Bosnian Muslims in
general. They stripped all the male Muslim prisoners, military and civilian, elderly and
young, of their personal belongings and identification, and deliberately and methodically
killed them solely on the basis of their identity.” Ian Traynor, “Hague Rules Srebrenica
Was Genocide,” Guardian, April 20, 2004, http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/
0,3858,4905287-103645,00.html.
28 Ratner and Abrams, Accountability for Human Rights Atrocities, p. 182.
29 Ratner and Abrams, Accountability for Human Rights Atrocities, p. 175.
30 Robertson, Crimes against Humanity, p. 240.
31 “Eichmann managed to escape [Germany] and flee to Argentina. Eventually abducted by
Israeli intelligence agents in Argentina, he was brought to Israel to stand trial. He was
charged with fifteen counts of crimes against the Jewish people and against humanity,
and of war crimes. Eichmann’s trial opened on April 11, 1961, and ended on August 14
of the same year. He was found guilty and sentenced to death (Israel allows the death
penalty only for crimes of genocide). An appeal of his death sentence was rejected in May
1962. Eichmann was hanged in the Ramla prison on the night of May 31, 1962. His
body was cremated and his ashes spread over the sea, outside the territorial waters of
Israel.” Waller, Becoming Evil, p. 95.
32 Schabas, Genocide in International Law, p. 351 (n. 28).
33 Cited in Tom Fawthrop and Helen Jarvis, Getting Away with Genocide? Elusive Justice and
the Khmer Rouge Tribunal (London: Pluto Press, 2004), p. 223.
34 Fawthrop and Jarvis, Getting Away with Genocide?, p. 240.
35 See “Q & A: Sierra Leone’s War Crimes Tribunal,” BBC Online, March 10, 2004,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/3547345.stm; also the Special Court’s website at
http://www.sc-sl.org.
36 Lyn S. Graybill, “Ten Years After, Rwanda Tries Reconciliation,” Current History, May
2004, p. 204.
37 George Packer, “Justice on a Hill,” in Mills and Brunner, eds, The New Killing Fields:
Massacre and the Politics of Intervention (New York: Basic Books, 2002), pp. 133–34.
JUSTICE, TRUTH, REDRESS
384
38 Graybill, “Ten Years After,” pp. 203, 205.
39 Packer, “Justice on a Hill,” p. 135.
40 Allende died in the coup, apparently by his own hand as military forces invaded the
Moneda presidential palace.
41 A technical consideration dictated, however, that Pinochet could be extradited only for
crimes committed after Britain’s incorporation of extraterritorial torture as a crime under
domestic law. Thus, only offenses from the final two years of Pinochet’s rule – not the
most repressive – could be extraditable.
42 A good investigation of the events, with many key documents, is Diana Woodhouse, The
Pinochet Case: A Legal and Constitutional Analysis (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2000).
43 “Ambiguous,” because Eichmann’s arrest by Israeli agents was technically a violation of
Argentine sovereignty (and was protested as such); furthermore, Eichmann was
dispatched clandestinely to Israel to stand trial, rather than being formally extradited.
44 Lord Millet quoted in Robertson, Crimes against Humanity, p. 395.
45 Ernesto Verdeja also refers to the Pinochet detention as “an example of how international
events can redefine domestic political contours,” and this was well before the Chilean
Supreme Court’s declaration that Pinochet was fit to stand trial. Verdeja, “Institutional
Responses to Genocide and Mass Atrocity,” in Jones, ed., Genocide, War Crimes and the
West, p. 339.
46 Robertson, Crimes against Humanity, p. 400.
47 They were, of course, sometimes put on trial for other things, such as corruption (as with
Arnoldo Alemán of Nicaragua and Carlos Andrés Pérez of Venezuela).
48 “Court Paves Way for Pinochet Trial,” Associated Press dispatch on CNN.com,
September 14, 2005, http://edition.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/americas/09/14/chile.
pinochet.ap.
49 “Writing the Next Chapter in a Latin American Success Story,” The Economist, April 2,
2005.
50 See Marc Weller, “On the Hazards of Foreign Travel for Dictators and Other
International Criminals,” International Affairs, 75: 3 (1999), pp. 599–617.
51 John G. Heidenrich, How to Prevent Genocide: A Guide for Policymakers, Scholars, and the
Concerned Citizen (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001), p. 67.
52 “Lawyers Attempt to Have President Bush Declared Persona Non Grata in Canada,”
Information Clearing House, November 19, 2004, http://207.44.245.159/article
7349.htm.
53 See Charles Aldinger, “Rumsfeld Debating Whether to Avoid Germany,” Reuters
dispatch, February 4, 2005.
54 See “Germany Rejects Rumsfeld War Crimes Probe,” Jurist, February 10, 2005, http://
jurist.law.pitt.edu/paperchase/2005/02/germany-rejects-rumsfeld-war-crimes.php.
55 Schabas, Genocide in International Law, pp. 368–69.
56 As Fawthrop and Jarvis note in the Cambodian context, “whereas proving genocide can
be very problematic because of the legal complexities relating to the definition of the
crime, conviction for crimes against humanity is far more likely.” Fawthrop and Jarvis,
Getting Away with Genocide?, p. 173.
57 For example, it is hard to see how “inhumane acts of a similar character intentionally
causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or to mental or physical health” (ICC
Statute) differ appreciably from the Genocide Convention’s injunction against “causing
serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group.”
58 Note especially the much wider range of “identifiable group[s] or collectivit[ies]” whose
persecution constitutes crimes against humanity under the ICC Statute.
59 For a summary of the US position on the Genocide Convention, see Samantha Power,
“The United States and Genocide Law: A History of Ambivalence,” ch. 10 in Sewall and
Kaysen, eds, The United States and the International Criminal Court, pp. 165–75.
60 For the complete text of the bill, see http://www.theorator.com/bills107/s857.html.
61 Alexander K.A. Greenawalt, “Rethinking Genocidal Intent: The Case for a Knowledge-
based Interpretation,” Columbia Law Review, 99 (1999), p. 2269.
JUSTICE, TRUTH, REDRESS
385
62 Rudolph, “Constructing an Atrocities Regime,” p. 678.
63 Klinghoffer and Klinghoffer, International Citizens’ Tribunals.
64 Arthur Jay Klinghoffer, “International Citizens’ Tribunals on Human Rights,” in Jones,
ed., Genocide, War Crimes and the West, pp. 350–51.
65 Klinghoffer and Klinghoffer, International Citizens’ Tribunals, p. 156.
66 See, e.g., the “Criminal Complaint” filed by former US Attorney General to the
International Court [People’s Tribunal] on Crimes Against Humanity Committed by
UN Security Council on Iraq, held in Spain in November 1996: Jones, ed., Genocide,
War Crimes and the West, pp. 270–73; and, most recently, “Declaration of the Jury of
Conscience – World Tribunal on Iraq,” Istanbul, June 23–27, 2005, http://www.waging
peace.org/articles/2005/06/27_jury-of-conscience-declaration.htm.
67 Klinghoffer and Klinghoffer, International Citizens’ Tribunals, p. 10.
68 Leo Kuper, The Prevention of Genocide (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985),
p. 193.
69 Ibid.
70 Falk quoted in Klinghoffer and Klinghoffer, International Citizens’ Tribunals, p. 134.
71 Professor Peter Burns of the University of British Columbia, personal communication,
May 12, 2005.
72 Minow, Between Vengeance and Forgiveness, pp. 60, 67.
73 Priscilla B. Hayner, Unspeakable Truths: Confronting State Terror and Atrocity (New York:
Routledge, 2001), p. 232.
74 “While most commissions have had the power to name perpetrators, however, only a few
have done so: El Salvador, Chad, the second commission of the African National
Congress, and the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission.” Hayner,
Unspeakable Truths pp. 107–8.
75 Hayner, Unspeakable Truths, p. 75.
76 Hayner, Unspeakable Truths, p. 111.
77 Fischman and Ross, article on “Group Treatment of Exiled Survivors of Torture,” in the
American Journal of Orthopsychiatry; quoted in Victoria Sanford, Buried Secrets: Truth and
Human Rights in Guatemala (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p. 241.
78 Hayner, Unspeakable Truths, p. 185.
79 Ibid.
80 See also Carolyn Nordstrom, “Terror Warfare and the Medicine of Peace,” in Catherine
Besteman, ed., Violence: A Reader (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), pp. 273–96.
81 Hayner, Unspeakable Truths, pp. 190–91. For a similar report from Uganda, see Marc
Lacey, “Atrocity Victims in Uganda Choose to Forgive,” New York Times, April 18, 2005.
“Remarkably, a number of those who have been hacked by the rebels [of the Lord’s
Resistance Army], who have seen their children carried off by them or who have endured
years of suffering in their midst say traditional justice must be the linchpin in ending the
war. Their main rationale: the line between victim and killer is too blurred.”
82 Elazar Barkan, The Guilt of Nations: Restitution and Negotiating Historical Injustices (New
York: W.W. Norton, 2000), pp. xv, 92, 95. For an overview of the campaign to win
restitution payments from Swiss banks, see Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European
Jews (3rd edn), Vol. 3 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), pp. 1274–82.
83 See Document 4, “The World Conference against Racism: Declarations on the
Transatlantic Slave Trade,” in Jones, ed., Genocide, War Crimes and the West, pp. 377–78.
84 Francis Njubi Nesbitt, “Coming to Terms with the Past: The Case for a Truth and
Reparations Commission on Slavery, Segregation and Colonialism,” in Jones, ed.,
Genocide, War Crimes and the West, p. 374.
85 “Pressure Mounts on Britain to Remember Its Slave Trade Past,” OneWorldUK, August
26, 2002.
86 “Maori Heads to be Returned to New Zealand,” The New Zealand Herald, January 13,
2005.
87 Definition from New Zealand Historic Places Trust, http://www.historic.org.nz/
Register/wahi_tapu.html.
JUSTICE, TRUTH, REDRESS
386
88 Colin Tatz, With Intent to Destroy: Reflecting on Genocide (London: Verso, 2003), p. 105.
89 Minow, Between Vengeance and Forgiveness, p. 114.
90 Queen Elizabeth quoted in Elazar Barkan, The Guilt of Nations: Restitution and
Negotiating Historical Injustices (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001), p. 264.
91 “A ‘Sorry Day’ in Australia,” BBC Online, May 26, 1998, http://news.bbc.co.uk/
1/hi/world/asia-pacific/100476.stm.
92 Clinton’s apology ran as follows: “It may seem strange to you here, especially the many
of you who lost members of your family, but all over the world there were people like me
sitting in offices, day after day after day, who did not fully appreciate the depth and the
speed with which you were being engulfed by this unimaginable terror. The international
community, together with nations in Africa, must bear its share of responsibility for this
tragedy as well. We did not act quickly enough after the killing began. We should not
have allowed the refugee camps to become safe haven for the killers. We did not
immediately call these crimes by their rightful name: genocide. We cannot change the
past. But we can and must do everything in our power to help you build a future without
fear and full of hope.” Cited in PBS Online News Hour, http://www.pbs.org/newshour/
bb/africa/jan-june98/rwanda_3-25a.html.
93 Barkan, The Guilt of Nations, p. 323.
94 Barkan, The Guilt of Nations, pp. 30, 273.
95 Tatz, With Intent to Destroy, p. 167.
96 A small step was taken by the Czech government in August 2005, apologizing to ethnic-
German expellees who were “active opponents of Nazism.” See “Czechs Apologize for
Mistreating German Anti-Nazis in WWII,” Reuters dispatch in Haaretz.com, August 30,
2005.
JUSTICE, TRUTH, REDRESS
387
Strategies of
Intervention and
Prevention
“‘Never Again,’” wrote human rights scholar Thomas Cushman, “. . . embodies in
crystalline form the preventative discourse” that dominates comparative genocide
studies:
through empirical and scientific observation of operationally defined cases of
genocide, one can isolate the variables and causal mechanisms at work and predict
future genocides. Armed with such predictions, one can take specific practical
steps to intervene and stop genocides from occurring. The key to success is the
development of political mechanisms or structures, which will heed the scientific
understanding and possess the political will, which means basically the ability and
the physical force necessary to intervene to stop genocide.
1
Cushman viewed such optimism skeptically. He rejected the notion that all genocides
can be prevented or suppressed, but he recognized that some can be, and he argued
for strategies sensitive to historical context and key actors’ practical limitations. With
such cautions in mind, this chapter tries to avoid easy answers and past solutions.
But it recognizes, and indeed typifies, the concern of the vast majority of genocide
scholars not just with understanding genocides of the past, but with confronting
present genocides and preventing them in the future.
Why should genocide be prevented? In a moral sense, the answer may seem self-
evident: to preserve people and collectivities at risk of destruction. But what if moral
considerations are excluded, and rational self-interest is stressed? This would at least
have the advantage of appealing to a broader range of potential supporters for the
project.
388
CHAPTER 16
In his thoughtful book How to Prevent Genocide, John Heidenrich addressed
this question head-on. He pointed out that genocides typically generate refugee flows
that can overwhelm neighboring countries and destabilize regions. Today, up to
twenty-seven million people may also be “internally displaced” worldwide as a result
of genocide. “Such global multitudes of homeless and often stateless people have
repeatedly drained the resources of the world’s emergency aid services.” He added that
“every major genocidal crisis also shakes the international order. No one in 1994
expected that, within two years, mass killings in tiny Rwanda would plunge the
enormity of Zaire/Congo into a civil war drawing in countries from almost half of
Africa – but that is what happened.”
2
It is thus in the self-interest of humanity – both morally and practically – to oppose
this crime against humanity. What are the most reliable warning signs and facilitating
conditions of genocide? What ideas have been proposed for genocide intervention
and prevention? What might we add to the mix? And what is the role of central actors,
from the international community and organizations, to the concerned and
potentially genocidal individual?
■
WARNING SIGNS
What are the most reliable indicators that genocide might be in the offing? Although
there is no “general ‘essence’ of genocide...across time and space,” some traits,
phenomena, and enabling conditions may serve as red flags.
3
In outlining them here,
I touch on some possible intervention strategies, but postpone a more substantial
engagement with this theme until later in the chapter.
• A history of genocide and intercommunal conflict. As political scientist Barbara
Harff reminded us, “perpetrators of genocide often are repeat offenders, because
elites and security forces may become habituated to mass killing as a strategic
response to challenges to state security.”
4
Genocide is thus frequently dependent
on pre-existing patterns of state behavior and state–society relations. Psychologist
Ervin Staub pointed in similar fashion to “ideologies of antagonism” among
communal groups, “the outcome of a long history of hostility and mutual
violence.”
5
• Severe economic crisis. Few factors seem so operative in genocidal violence
as economic upheaval and catastrophe. When the material basis of people’s lives
is thrown into question, they are depressingly prone to seek scapegoats among
minorities (or majorities); to heed an extremist political message; and to be lured
by opportunities to loot and pillage. Economic crisis may undermine the
legitimacy and administrative capacity of state authorities, who may be more
likely to lash out genocidally as a means of maintaining power. Such crises also
encourage the rise of rebellious, revolutionary, and secessionist movements. These
movements may fuel the ruling authorities’ paranoia, and sometimes contain a
genocidal impetus of their own.
• Mobilization along lines of communal cleavage. It is natural for people of a
particular religion, language, or history – the usual markers of “ethnic” identity
STRATEGIES OF INTERVENTION AND PREVENTION
389
– to associate with others who share those traits. Social and political mobilization
along these lines is not inherently bad and violence-provoking. Indeed, if
successfully managed, it may head off outbreaks of violence. No one anticipates
a genocidal outbreak in Belgium or Switzerland, for example – two countries
whose political systems are largely structured along communal lines.
Nonetheless, a healthy and nongenocidal society will, in place of or in addition
to such mobilizations, include a range of “cross-cutting” forums, movements, and
socialization mechanisms that encourage people to move beyond limited
identifications to a more cosmopolitan vision. Such relations can help offset us-
and-them thinking, as Ervin Staub wrote: “To evolve an appreciation of alikeness
and a feeling of connectedness, members of subgroups of society must live
together, work together, play together; their children must go to school together.
Members of different nations must also work and play together. . . . To reduce
prejudice requires positive contact.”
6
National and, in particular, federal governments have a central responsibility
to ensure that communal identities are successfully managed, and that
constituencies are represented fairly in the halls of political and economic power.
Political scientist Kal Holsti argues that “the most important [variable] is
inclusiveness”:
There must be a deliberate policy by governments not to exclude specific groups
from participating in the political system. If you look at Rwanda, Burundi,
or Liberia and other places, the one thing they have in common is that one
group – whether a minority or a majority – systematically excludes other groups
from political participation, from government largesse, and from government
programs. In some cases excluded groups were thrown out of the country;
in other cases they were killed in genocides or politicides; in yet other cases
they were simply denied the vote or in other ways discriminated against. In
the countries that have succeeded, there is an attempt to be politically inclusive.
. . . There is no single formula, but the common characteristic . . . is an inclu-
sive political system and political parties that transcend ethnic and language
groups and that focus instead on policy differences.
7
• Hate propaganda. A standard feature of genocidal mobilization is hate pro-
paganda, including in mass media, public political speech, personal websites, and
graffiti. The proliferation of media organs and other institutions devoted to hate
speech is usually identifiable, though an increase in frequency and/or intensity
of annihilationist rhetoric may be harder to measure. To the extent that it can be
gauged, it may identify future génocidaires – and their targets. Hate speech
underpins “exclusionary ideologies . . . that define target groups as expendable.”
8
How can one confront hate propaganda? Pluralistic societies encounter some
of the same vexing questions as in the case of genocide denial (Chapter 14),
notably: is it legitimate to suppress dissident speech? Whereas denialism can be
confronted with logical and empirical refutation, and includes a grey area of
legitimate discussion and debate, hate propaganda directly incites violence. But
repressing it may only spur the hatred that underlies it, and give publicity to the
STRATEGIES OF INTERVENTION AND PREVENTION
390
propagandists. Constructive countermeasures – support for pluralistic media
projects and political initiatives; effective use of education systems – are generally
preferable.
9
However, while this argument may be comfortably advanced in
democratic living rooms, it has different implications in societies where history
and current indicators warn of genocide. Suppressing ethnic hate propaganda
in Rwanda, for instance, may run counter to cherished liberal principles; but I,
for one, would not object to it.
• Unjust discriminatory legislation and related measures. Some discriminatory
legislation may actually help suppress a potential genocide. For example, an affir-
mative action policy (Bumiputra, or “sons of the soil”) was instituted in Malaysia
after ethnic rioting between Malays and ethnic Chinese. It proved acceptable to
both groups, advancing Malays in areas where they were under-represented, while
preserving the rights of the Chinese minority and stanching violence against it.
In general, though, discrimination embodied in law (and in deliberately unequal
systems of “justice”) serves to marginalize and isolate a designated group – perhaps
as a prelude to genocide.
Another kind of discriminatory legislation deserves attention: that aimed at
restricting possession of firearms. My liberal sympathies incline me towards
effective gun control as a measure of a civilized society. However, the argument
advanced by Jay Simkin et al., members of the odd-sounding group Jews for the
Preservation of Firearm Ownership (www.jpfo.org), rings true. They contend that
most instances of mass killing have been preceded by systematic campaigns to
seize arms from intended genocidal targets.
10
A reasonable middle ground may
lie in promoting the restriction of firearm ownership in plural societies, while
recognizing that campaigns to suppress private gun ownership in illiberal and
repressive societies may aim to deny a minority the means to resist genocide.
• Severe and systematic state repression. Repression and outright state terror are
especially trenchant indicators that a genocidal campaign may be brewing.
Regardless of whether genocide ensues, such abuses must be denounced and
suppressed. The imposition of emergency measures; restrictions on civil liberties;
the banning or harassing of opposition parties and organizations; arbitrary
detentions and large-scale round-ups of civilians; the advent or increased use of
torture as state policy; substantial flows of refugees and internally displaced
persons (IDPs) – should all arouse deep concern, and may well presage a genocidal
outbreak.
These acts are predominantly inflicted in authoritarian and underdeveloped
societies, but citizens of democratic countries should acknowledge that they are
not immune to creeping societal repression. They should be alert to violations
of democracy and human rights at home and abroad, exploiting liberal
democracy’s broad freedoms in doing so.
The groups most likely to be targeted for repression include ethnic, racial, and
religious minorities; “middleman” groups, especially those occupying an envied
place in the economy (see Chapter 11); political dissidents and accused “enemies
of the people,” especially those involved in nationalist and secessionist movements
or class rebellions; and finally, groups labeled as “outcasts,” “asocials,” and “root-
less and shiftless,” or depicted as outside the universe of obligation (Chapter 1).
STRATEGIES OF INTERVENTION AND PREVENTION
391
My own contribution to early-warning mechanisms revolves around the
vulnerability of adult males, notably men of “battle age” (roughly 15–55). As I
argued in Chapter 13, there are grounds for claiming that this group, usually
described as the least vulnerable, is in fact most vulnerable to genocide and the
repression that routinely precedes it – if by “most vulnerable” we mean most liable
to be targeted for mass killing and other violent atrocities.
11
The United Nations
and other international organizations, governmental and nongovernmental,
require a paradigm shift in their thinking on gender, violence, and humanitarian
intervention – one that allows specific (not exclusive) attention to be paid to adult
men and male adolescents. How, for example, might greater sensitivity to the
vulnerability of “battle-age” males at Srebrenica have assisted in heading off the
gendercide of July 1995?
12
■
HUMANITARIAN INTERVENTION
When people’s lives are at risk from persecution, there is a strong moral obligation to
do what is reasonably possible to help. It is not enough to seal up the windows against
the smell.
Jonathan Glover
The 1990s inaugurated a new age of humanitarian intervention. With the end of
the Cold War, the way lay open for hard-nosed realpolitik to be set aside in favor of
efforts to help suffering and persecuted peoples. The United Nations would finally
come into its own as the arbiter and peace-builder that Franklin Roosevelt originally
envisaged. Regional actors would step up to address nearby trouble spots.
At the same time, the collapse of the Soviet empire and of superpower rivalries
had allegedly “lifted the lid off” a host of simmering conflicts, mostly ethno-national
in nature. One prominent observer warned of a “coming anarchy” of state collapse
and untrammeled violence.
13
In many parts of the world – Africa, former Soviet
Central Asia, the Caucasus, the Balkans – anarchy indeed arrived.
During this period, “humanitarian intervention” came to be associated with a
military response to atrocities, separating warring factions, supervising negotiations,
and brokering political settlements. The four key cases of, and debates over, humani-
tarian intervention in the 1990s – Iraqi Kurdistan (1991); Bosnia-Herzegovina
(1992–95); and Kosovo and East Timor (both 1999) – all featured such interventions.
However, might such military interventions instead represent failures, in the same way
that successful fire-fighting can attest to inadequate fire prevention? In this discussion,
I first address non-military intervention strategies. Military solutions should be a last
resort, although mounted resolutely and with all dispatch when necessary.
The authors of a Canadian-sponsored report, The Responsibility to Protect, propose
a useful range of non-military strategies. These “may come in the form of devel-
opment assistance and other efforts to help address the root cause of potential conflict;
or efforts to provide support for local initiatives to advance good governance, human
rights, or the rule of law; or good offices missions, mediation efforts and other efforts
to promote dialogue or reconciliation.”
14
Lending political support – whether good
STRATEGIES OF INTERVENTION AND PREVENTION
392
offices, formal mediation, or simply rhetorical support – to governments that act
respectfully towards their citizens is one of the most constructive interventionist
measures.
15
Conversely, withholding aid may be a potent intervention strategy. Obviously, it
is essential that military and “security” aid are not provided to forces of repression.
However, the history of recent decades suggests that such forces are often favored
aid recipients. France, for instance, armed and trained the Rwandan génocidaires even
when their murderous intentions were plain, and continued to support them after
they had slaughtered up to a million of their fellow citizens. As pointed out in Chapter
12, the United States is without twentieth-century equal in supporting forces of
atrocity and genocide beyond its borders.
With regard to economic intervention, it is worth abiding by medicine’s
Hippocratic oath: First, do no harm. Interventionist economic policies such as “aus-
terity” measures and “structural adjustment” programs may increase social stress in
a way that contributes directly or indirectly to genocide. Rwanda and, arguably,
Yugoslavia in the 1980s and 1990s provide examples. Cheerleading for wholesale
economic “globalization” should thus be rejected. As international legal theorist
Richard Falk has written, “Economic globalisation...weakens the overall capacity
and will of governments to address human wrongs either within their own society
or elsewhere....It seems appropriate to link economic globalisation with a high
threshold of tolerance for human wrongs, at least for now.”
16
Moreover, if structural
and institutional violence can themselves constitute genocide, then structural
adjustment measures and the like may be not only a cause of genocide, but a form
of it.
Sanctions
Economic and political sanctions lie at an intermediate point between “soft”
intervention strategies and military intervention. As The Responsibility to Protect
summarized such measures, they may include “arms embargoes,” “ending military
cooperation and training programmes,” “financial sanctions,” “restrictions on income-
generating activities such as oil, diamonds...logging and drugs,” “restrictions on
access to petroleum products,” “aviation bans,” “restrictions on diplomatic repre-
sentation,” “restrictions on travel,” and “suspension of membership or expulsion from
international or regional bodies.”
17
To this list might be added the application of
judicial sanctions, such as indictments for war crimes and genocide.
The difficulty with sanctions lies in targeting them to impede a repressive or
genocidal leadership, without inflicting generalized human suffering. In two
twentieth-century cases, human destruction caused by malevolent and/or misdirected
sanctions could be considered genocidal. The economic blockade imposed on
Germany during and after the First World War killed up to three-quarters of a million
people.
18
The sanctions imposed on the Iraqi population in peacetime provide a
second case (see Chapter 1).
In part as a result of the Iraqi catastrophe, “blanket economic sanctions in
particular have been increasingly discredited in recent years,” because they impose
STRATEGIES OF INTERVENTION AND PREVENTION
393
“greatly disproportionate...hardships” on civilians.
19
Appropriately targeted
measures, however, may repress would-be génocidaires. These actions can include
freezing of bank accounts; travel bans; and (more controversially) sporting, cultural,
and academic boycotts.
The United Nations
The UN has an abysmal record in confronting and forestalling genocide. According
to Leo Kuper and others, this reflects the organization’s foundation on Westphalian
norms of state sovereignty (Chapter 12), and the desire of most member states to
avoid shining a spotlight on their own atrocities, past or present.
There is and always has been another side to the UN, however, typified by the
extraordinarily effective specialized agencies (UNICEF, the World Food Program, and
so on), and by the UN’s contribution to peacekeeping and peace-building around
the world. Since the late 1980s, the UN has increasingly stressed peace-building,
described by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan as:
the creation or strengthening of national institutions, monitoring elections,
promoting human rights, providing for reintegration and rehabilitation pro-
grammes, as well as creating conditions for resumed development. Peacebuilding
does not replace ongoing humanitarian and development activities in countries
emerging from crises. Rather, it aims to build on, add to, or reorient such activities
in ways that are designed to reduce the risk of a resumption of conflict and
contribute to creating conditions most conducive to reconciliation, reconstruction
and recovery.
20
These measures are vital to making “Never Again” a reality. Peace-building has
been implemented most visibly in three Central American countries (El Salvador,
Nicaragua, and Guatemala) after their civil wars. In coordination with non-
governmental organizations, both indigenous and foreign, the UN oversaw the
demobilization and reintegration of fighting forces; constructed new societal
institutions virtually from scratch; organized and supervised elections; monitored
violations of human rights; and assisted the work of truth-and-reconciliation com-
missions, among other duties. On balance, this must be counted as a major UN
success, providing a wealth of knowledge and practice for future genocide prevention
and conflict resolution.
Overall, significant evidence supports the conclusion of The Responsibility to Protect
that the UN “is unquestionably the principal institution for building, consolidating
and using the authority of the international community.”
21
As John Heidenrich
noted, “by signing the UN Charter, every member has obligated itself to adhere to
the most basic norms of civilized conduct, which means that only through outright
hypocrisy can a government commit a crime as grievous as genocide.” Moreover,
“only the United Nations has the Security Council, the only international body with
the global legal right to compel countries to adhere to international humanitarian
treaties and customs, by force if necessary.”
22
STRATEGIES OF INTERVENTION AND PREVENTION
394
■
WHEN IS MILITARY INTERVENTION JUSTIFIED?
Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, sets a useful standard for
military intervention. “Given the death, destruction, and disorder that are often
inherent in war and its aftermath,” he writes, “humanitarian intervention” – by which
he means military intervention – “should be reserved as an option only in situations
of ongoing or imminent mass slaughter. Only the direst cases of large-scale slaughter
can justify war’s deliberate taking of life.” Thus, Roth argues,
military action must be the last reasonable option. Second, the intervention must
be primarily guided by a humanitarian purpose. Third, it should be conducted
to maximize respect for international human rights law. Fourth, it must be
reasonably likely to do more good than harm. Finally, it should ideally, though not
necessarily, be endorsed by the UN Security Council or another body with
significant multilateral authority.
23
In the wake of the Kosovo intervention, carried out without UN Security Council
authorization, an Independent International Commission was formed under the
stewardship of South African Judge Richard Goldstone (who also spent two years as
head of the ICTY tribunal at the Hague). One commission member, political scientist
Mary Kaldor, summarized the commission’s conclusion “that the Kosovo intervention
was illegal, because there was no Security Council resolution, but legitimate because
it resolved a humanitarian crisis and had widespread support within the international
community and civil society.” The “illegal but legitimate” verdict was an elegant one,
but attested to “very dangerous” gaps and imprecisions in international law and
interventionist policies.
24
Many commentators, however, have criticized military interventions as currently
framed, because they tend to accord carte blanche to powerful states (themselves at
no risk of military intervention) to dictate to the world’s weaker states. In the view
of US Law Professor Stephen Holmes, this may extend to mounting invasions on
supposedly “humanitarian” grounds. For all the lofty rhetoric that accompanies them,
Holmes argued, military interventions are usually selective, self-interested, and
counterproductive.
25
A veritable cottage industry of texts sprang up following the
1999 Kosovo intervention, depicting it as malignant imperialism rather than an
altruistic venture.
26
The broader point – that “humanitarian” intervention often
masks imperial ambition – is cogent. Intervention discourse may legitimately be
analyzed for ulterior motives, although their existence is inevitable and should not
rule out intervention altogether.
Consider, for example, the place of regional actors in the intervention equation.
Such actors have played the key role in virtually all successful interventions against
genocide over the past three-and-a-half decades (“success” being measured by a halt
to the killing). In 1971, India, the regional hegemon of South Asia, intervened to stop
the genocide against Bengalis in East Pakistan (see Box 8a). In 1979, Tanzania
overthrew the Idi Amin government in Uganda, ending his depredations (though
installing a new regime under Milton Obote that proved little better). Also in 1979,
STRATEGIES OF INTERVENTION AND PREVENTION
395
Vietnam invaded Cambodia and pushed the Khmer Rouge regime to the margins.
NATO’s 1999 intervention in Kosovo brought an end to Serb genocide in the
province, and allowed 800,000 ethnic Albanian refugees to return. Later that same
year, Australia played the leading role in ending Indonesia’s genocidal occupation of
East Timor; at the dawn of the new millennium, Nigeria headed the interventions
in Sierra Leone and Liberia staged by ECOWAS (the Economic Community of West
African States).
In none of these interventions, with the possible exception of Australia in East
Timor, did moral and humanitarian considerations act as primary catalysts. Ulterior
motives were always present.
27
However, in a world of states that is still run on classical
notions of sovereignty and realpolitik, one arguably takes what one can get. Ulterior
motives may even be welcome for the added spur they provide to needed inter-
ventions.
The advantages of intervention by regional actors are several. Geographical
contiguity minimizes logistical difficulties, although this may be offset by a lack of
resources (apart from the Australian case, all the interventions cited above were
carried out by poor developing nations). With contiguity often comes a degree
of ethnocultural similarity, making it less likely that interventions will be seen as
foreign or imperial. Regional powers may also have a vested interest in guarding
against the spill-over of genocide, something that more distant actors might not
share.
At the same time, however, vested interests operate, and may undermine the
intervention. The conflict in Congo – Africa’s first “world war” (Box 9a) – fed the
expansionist aspirations and pillaging ambitions of a host of African nations.
Logistical difficulties are likely to prevail where regional actors are underdeveloped,
with limited resources. In such cases, material assistance from the developed world
is critical. Political scientist Alan Kuperman has argued that “only the US military
has a large, long-haul cargo air fleet,” without which “rapid reaction to most parts
of the world is impossible.”
28
Journalist Michael Hirsh goes so far as to argue that
the “most important future role for the UN” might be that of “a legitimizer for local
forces” to intervene, with assistance and logistical backing from the developed
countries who supply most of the UN’s budget.
29
A standing “peace army”?
In a contribution to his edited Encyclopedia of Genocide, Israel Charny proposed the
creation of an International Peace Army as a “standing machinery...for responding
to eruptions of genocide, at any time or place in the world.” Such a force:
would move automatically into action any time that authenticated reports are
received of the mass killing of any group of unarmed civilians, such as the ethnic
cleansing of a village or a region. The basic mandate of the International Peace Army
would be to take action in the same way that we are accustomed today in
democratic countries to call on the police at the first evidence of murder or even
possible murderous assault.
30
STRATEGIES OF INTERVENTION AND PREVENTION
396
The Peace Army would be pluralistic in composition (with “nationals from a very
wide range of countries”). Charny divided the Peace Army into three units: one
military, another medical and humanitarian, and a third designed “for the Rebuilding
of Safe and Tolerant Communities.” In a nod to the growing scope and complexity
of UN peacekeeping and peace-building operations from the late 1980s, this final
component would bring “skilled administrators and technicians for reestablishing the
basic structure of community life.” It would also aim to “mobilize indigenous leaders
of the peoples involved in the conflict – religious leaders, political leaders, popular
folk heroes including media celebrities, sports stars, beloved popular singers, leaders
in education, and so on of the indigenous culture – who will agree to speak to the
building of a new era of tolerance and reconciliation.”
31
A Peace Army may seem utopian, but contemporary developments make it less
so. For one thing, Charny’s imagined force would be an “affiliated police arm” of the
United Nations.
32
In the new millennium, the UN has taken steps to establish a
standing army that, with the input of humanitarian organizations, could fulfill many
of the functions Charny envisaged. The plan calls for twelve nations – Canada and
Denmark have already signed on – to contribute to a 6,000-strong force on standby
for a call from the Secretary-General and the Security Council. A different, possibly
complementary, Dutch proposal calls for a “fire brigade” of 2,500 to 5,000 soldiers
as “a permanent, rapidly deployable brigade” to intervene in genocidal outbreaks. Five
thousand troops is roughly the force that Major-General Roméo Dallaire pleaded
for when the Rwandan genocide was underway. “If I had had such a force available
to me while I was the UNAMIR Force Commander sometime in mid-April, we could
have saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of people,” Dallaire asserted.
33
The European Union, which after the UN represents the world’s leading force for
democracy, peace, and humanitarianism,
34
has considered creating an “EU Rapid
Reaction Force” (ERRF), capable of deploying up to 60,000 soldiers within sixty days
and maintaining them in the field for up to one year. The EU has also floated the
idea of “battle groups” consisting of elite battalions of 1,500 soldiers, able to deploy
within fifteen days and stay in the field for a month. Not to be left out, by 2010 the
African Union also seeks to develop an African Standby Force consisting of
“regionally-based standby brigades, numbering between 3,500 and 5,000 troops,”
deployable within two weeks.
35
All these initiatives are guided by a perception that
the hidebound, bureaucratic process of deploying peacemaking and peacekeeping
operations gives génocidaires and war criminals too great a head start. For the UN
and the Europeans alike, there is the added attraction of developing a military force
that does not rely on the US for funding and logistics.
Finally, there is the possibility of an “international legion of volunteers,” as
Heidenrich has discussed. Such corps have played an important role in some conflicts,
from the Spanish Civil War to the French Foreign Legion’s varied postings. Some
proposals even envisage the use of mercenaries in this role, arguing that the unsavory
reputation attached to these forces is outdated.
36
STRATEGIES OF INTERVENTION AND PREVENTION
397
■
IDEOLOGIES AND INDIVIDUALS
Who am I and of what am I capable?
James Waller
Our analysis now shifts from the national and international–political sphere to the
more intimate level of human beings’ minds and hearts. What difference can
individual witnessing make to genocide? How do ideologies, whether religious or
secular, spur us to genocide perpetration – and prevention? And how can we confront
and mitigate our own potential to inflict or support genocidal acts?
The role of the honest witness
Witnessing and transmitting are central to genocide prevention and intervention.
The key is honest, accurate witnessing, combined with the capacity to communicate
what one has witnessed. The “relentless keepers of the truth,” as Russian intellectual
Nadezhda Mandelstam called them, are genocide’s most powerful opponents, and
“the best proof that good, not evil, will prevail in the end.”
37
Conversely, those who
fail to witness honestly – who turn away, distort, and deny – are reliable allies of the
génocidaires.
A fascinating contrast in honest versus dishonest witnessing is provided by the
terror-famine in Ukraine (1932–33). At the height of the famine, with millions dying
throughout the countryside, British socialists Sidney and Beatrice Webb traveled
to the USSR. They kept well away from the starving rural areas, and subsequently
wrote “a glowing account” of their visit (Soviet Communism – A New Civilisation,
published in 1935). The New York Times’ Moscow correspondent, Walter Duranty,
also avoided all mention of the famine and the state’s genocidal manipulation of it.
Duranty’s reports influenced the Roosevelt administration’s decision to recognize the
Soviet government – in 1933, as famine, collectivization of the countryside, and the
crushing of peasant resistance all reached their zenith.
38
The witnessing of British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge was radically different.
Arriving in the Soviet Union in 1933, Muggeridge took the simple expedient of
buying a train ticket to journey through the heartland of Ukraine and the North
Caucasus. En route, he witnessed some of the horrific scenes of famine described in
Chapter 5. “Whatever else I may do or think in the future, I must never pretend that
I haven’t seen this,” Muggeridge wrote in his diary.
39
He returned to publish an account
of “millions of starving peasants, their bodies often swollen from lack of food,”
struggling with “soldier members of the GPU [secret police] carrying out the
instructions of the dictatorship of the proletariat.” The Stalinist forces, Muggeridge
wrote, “had gone over the country like a swarm of locusts and taken away every-
thing edible . . . [and] had reduced some of the most fertile land in the world to a
melancholy desert.”
40
Like Muggeridge, the diplomats, missionaries, and some German soldiers who
witnessed the Armenian genocide were central to catalyzing international protest, and
STRATEGIES OF INTERVENTION AND PREVENTION
398
some small intervention in the Armenian plight. Their writings and photographs are
essential to our current understanding of the genocide, and serve as a bulwark against
the efforts of those who deny it (see chapters 4, 14). By contrast, the withdrawal of
nearly all media and most foreign observers from Rwanda in the early stages of the
1994 genocide meant that only the most fragmentary imagery and testimony of that
holocaust reached the outside world. Even in an age of globalized mass communi-
cation, the Rwandan génocidaires inflicted their horrors with only rare outside
witnesses, and no outside intervention.
Often, honest witnessing must be carried out at great risk of capture, torture, and
death. At such times it inspires real awe. A dramatic example is Jan Karski, a Polish
diplomat in his late twenties, who sought to bring the truth of the Jewish Holocaust
to the outside world. Operating throughout Nazi-occupied Poland, Karski “disguised
himself as a Jew, donning an armband with the Star of David, and smuggled himself
through a tunnel into the Warsaw ghetto. Posing as a Ukrainian militiaman, he also
infiltrated Belzec, a Nazi death camp near the border between Poland and Ukraine.”
One marvels at the danger and spectacular deception hinted at in this passage.
At the end of 1942, Karski escaped to London “carrying hundreds of documents on
miniature microfilm contained in the shaft of a key.” He immediately sought a
meeting with representatives of the Jewish community. Passing on Karski’s reports
to the World Jewish Congress in New York, Ignacy Schwartzbart, a prominent
London Jew, urged his audience to “BELIEVE THE UNBELIEVABLE.”
41
Even many
Jews, however, found the information too unbelievable to be credited. This serves as
a painful reminder that no link need exist between honest witnessing and genocide
prevention. A host of unpredictable factors – above all, public attention and political
will – must come into play if information is to translate into action.
42
In the contemporary age, the witnessing of human rights organizations and
activists is indispensable. Global NGOs such as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty
International, the Red Cross, and Doctors Without Borders, as well as legions of
national and regional projects, provide the most extensive, detailed, and informed
analyses of rights violations and human suffering. One activist describes their core
approach as “promoting change by reporting facts.”
43
Other activist initiatives preserve past traumas, including genocide, in historical
memory – another form of witnessing. One example is the Russian Memorial Society.
“Memorial was founded by a group of young historians, some of whom had been
collecting oral histories of [Gulag] camp survivors for many years,” writes Anne
Applebaum. “Later, Memorial would also lead the battle to identify the corpses buried
in mass graves outside Moscow and Leningrad, and to build monuments and
memorials to the Stalinist era.” By the end of the 1990s, Memorial had established
itself as “the most important centre for the study of Soviet history, as well as for the
defence of human rights, in the Russian federation.” Its publications were “known
to Soviet scholars around the world for their accuracy, their fidelity to facts, and their
careful, judicious archives.”
44
STRATEGIES OF INTERVENTION AND PREVENTION
399
Ideologies, religious and secular
The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare’s evildoers stopped short at
a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
The role of religious belief in genocide prevention and intervention may be viewed
from two perspectives. On one hand, religious believers throughout history have
derived from their faith an abiding love and respect for humanity. In a practical sense,
this has led them to cross lines of religion, ethnicity, and social class to help genocide’s
victims. In colonial Spanish America, Bartolomé de las Casas denounced atrocities
against the Indians with a passion that still cuts through cant nearly five centuries later
(though Las Casas supported the importation of African slaves to reduce the burden
on indigenous peoples). Catholics in Poland during the Second World War regularly
sheltered Jews (see Chapter 10). One such rescuer, Irene Gut Opdyke, was a devout
believer who wrote in her memoirs: “Courage is a whisper from above: when you
listen with your heart, you will know what to do and how and when.”
45
Post-genocide
Rwanda witnessed a surge of converts to Islam, since the country’s Muslim minority,
by contrast with its Catholic Church, had saved Tutsis rather than standing by as
they were massacred – or joining in. Surely, the humane and cosmopolitan vision
guiding much religious belief and practice is to be acknowledged and admired.
The case of Rwanda’s Catholic Church, however, reminds us that religious
believers often play a negligent or even murderous role in genocide.
46
“The very worst
things that men have ever done,” said British politician William Gladstone, “have
been done when they were performing acts of violence in the name of religion.”
47
In the opinion of the great sociologist Barrington Moore, Jr. – summarized by his
student Charles Tilly – monotheistic religions, in particular, foster “gross intolerance,
hence readiness to kill outsiders, because of their sharply drawn distinctions between
the worthy and the unworthy, the pure and the impure.”
48
But polytheism provides
no barrier to fanaticism, as Muslim and Sikh survivors of Hindu nationalist violence
can attest.
The distinguishing element here is not religious belief per se, but extremism
and exclusivism through a religious lens. There are few more important tasks of
genocide prevention than confronting religious extremists and fundamentalists, at
home and abroad – not with persecution or bombs, which would only fuel their
martyr complex, but wherever possible with a pluralistic, humanistic education
system, and a cosmopolitan
49
counter-discourse (including by religious moderates)
in the public sphere.
Secular ideologies are also Janus-faced in relation to genocide. Democratic and
pluralistic ideologies are primarily responsible for our concern about genocide and
human rights violations. The very idea of “human rights” is a product of the secular
Enlightenment in Europe, though it resonates with many religious and philosophical
traditions worldwide. These ideologies have underpinned enormous positive changes
in human civilization. State-sponsored slavery is no more.
50
The most blatant forms
of colonialism have mostly been expunged from the Earth. Major wars and genocides
across a range of previously conflictive “dyads” are now unlikely or unthinkable
STRATEGIES OF INTERVENTION AND PREVENTION
400
(France and Germany is the most commonly cited pairing). Institutions whose
gratuitous cruelty has something in common with the sadism of genocide – such as
drawing-and-quartering or breaking on a wheel
51
– are also historical relics.
Secular-humanist ideologies have given rise to the idea of global civil society and
“world citizenship,” vital to transcending the differences of culture, class, and religion
that can fuel genocides. A world citizen holds that:
Everyone is an individual endowed with certain rights and subject to certain
obligations; everyone is capable of voluntaristic action seeking rational solutions
to social problems; everyone has the right and obligation to participate in the
grand human project; everyone is, therefore, a citizen of the world polity. World
citizenship is the institutional endowment of authority and agency on individuals.
It infuses each individual with the authority to pursue particularistic interests,
preferably in organizations, while also authorizing individuals to promote
collective goods defined in largely standardized ways.
52
But secular ideologies have also underpinned most genocides of the last two centuries.
One thinks of the genocidal expansionists into an economically “unexploited” North
America; the Young Turk modernizers of the Ottoman Empire, and their counter-
parts in Stalinist Russia; the Nazis with their fanatical racism and nationalism;
and the Khmer Rouge communists in Cambodia. The genocidal consequences of
much secular ideology were eloquently conveyed by a repentant Communist Party
activist, speaking about the imposition of famine and collectivization on the Soviet
countryside:
With the rest of my generation I firmly believed that the ends justified the means.
Our great goal was the universal triumph of Communism, and for the sake
of that goal everything was permissible – to lie, to steal, to destroy hundreds of
thousands and even millions of people, all those who were hindering our work or
could hinder it, everyone who stood in the way. And to hesitate or doubt about
all this was to give in to “intellectual squeamishness” and “stupid liberalism,” the
attribute of people who “could not see the forest for the trees.” . . . I was convinced
that I was accomplishing the great and necessary transformation of the country-
side; that in the days to come the people who lived there would be better off for
it; that their distress and suffering were a result of their own ignorance or the
machinations of the class enemy; that those who sent me – and I myself – knew
better than the peasants how they should live, what they should sow and when they
should plow.
53
A mirror image of such thinking in the capitalist West depicts those who stand in
the way of “modernization” and “development” as backward and disposable, while
the millions of casualties inflicted by colonial famines or contemporary “structural
adjustment” policies are justified by the noble ends of market liberalism.
There is a critical individual dimension – in both senses of the word “critical” –
to religious and secular ideologies alike. Each person must monitor, as objectively
as possible, the tendency to hatred and exclusivism that is present in us all. The
STRATEGIES OF INTERVENTION AND PREVENTION
401
temptation always exists to believe we are superior and right – whether we bolster
this with religious belief, a secular stance, or a mix of the two. Actually, we might
be “superior” and in the right! I do believe some epistemologies (strategies of
knowing), moral frameworks, and social options are superior to others, or I would
not be writing this book. But we must guard against hubris. As Ruby Plenty Chiefs
reminds us: “Great evil has been done on earth by people who think they have all
the answers.”
54
How can you as an individual monitor your beliefs, and reduce (forgive me) your
genocidal potential?
• Educate yourself broadly and deeply. If your beliefs are congruent with reality
and a viable moral framework, they should not collapse in the face of divergent
or opposed views. Expose yourself to these viewpoints, by consulting a wide range
of media – that is now easier than ever. Learn from contrary-minded others.
Surprisingly often, you will find that those who think differently become more
familiar to you, even real friends. This should make you less likely to support their
marginalization or extermination.
• Travel if you can. This is also easier than ever, even outside the privileged West.
My own most intensive learning has come from traveling as much of the world
as time and money have allowed. Talk to people in those distant lands, like-
minded and otherwise. You are bound to discover strong bonds of commonality;
once you have visited a place and interacted with its inhabitants, you are less likely
to want to return to kill them, or to support anyone with that agenda. If you
can’t travel, or won’t, then at least read voraciously (history, current affairs, travel
accounts, and guides); watch the History Channel and Discovery Channel; surf
the Net for relevant perspectives and insights. As always, seek to balance your
receptivity with critical thinking and a healthy dose of skepticism.
• “Keep [y]our consciences soft and vulnerable.” “Only then,” write Donald and
Laura Miller, “will we rise up to challenge the suffering that surrounds us. Denial
of evil is a defense mechanism that a just world simply cannot afford.”
55
Be open
to the distress of others, and to discrimination against them. As the Argentine
revolutionary Ché Guevara wrote in a 1966 letter to his children: “Above all, be
capable always of feeling to your very depths any injustice committed against
anyone in any part of the world.”
56
There is denial of evil and there is saturation by evil. It is easy, in the face of
genocide’s massive violence, to allow it and similar tragedies to slide into abstrac-
tion. Aid agencies speak of “compassion fatigue.” Allen Feldman pointed to a
“cultural anesthesia” born of “generalities of bodies – dead, wounded, starving,
diseased, and homeless . . . pressed against the television screen as mass articles.”
57
Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin famously commented, “One death is a tragedy; a
million deaths is a statistic.”
58
The solution lies in empathy and learning. I recall sitting in a restaurant in
Colombia in 1994, watching fragmentary images on TV of dozens of bodies
floating down a river somewhere far away. These are today among the indelible
images of the Rwandan holocaust. My thought at the time? “Oh jeez, more tribal
violence in Africa.” Only after plowing through a few thousand pages of
STRATEGIES OF INTERVENTION AND PREVENTION
402
testimony and reportage on the genocide, material that stunned and changed
me, did I feel I had expiated the shame of that first ignorant, cavalier reaction.
• Question authority. I do not say “Reject authority.” Much authority is authori-
tative rather than authoritarian. It derives its legitimacy from a power to persuade
through reason and moral appeal. On the other hand, the great majority of
genocides are carried out under authoritarian rule of one kind or another, and
formally democratic societies are far from immune to these temptations –
especially in times of proclaimed emergency. Many if not most of the readers of
this book will be called upon, at some point in their lives, to decide whether to
support a call to large-scale collective violence. Is that call warranted, or is it a
summons to atrocity? All authority rests on conformity, and conforming may be
immoral or inhuman. When this is the case, move beyond questioning to active
opposition.
• Support worthy causes. You know a few already. Some of those devoted specifically
to genocide prevention may be found on the webpage for this book
(http://www.genocidetext.net). Consider supporting by participating, not just by
contributing money. Participation brings you into contact and solidarity with
other human beings. This is essential to building a global movement against
genocide.
Proponents of worthy causes may sometimes use violence to achieve their goals
– typically, to bring an end to violence (including structural violence) by an
oppressor. These actions may not be pretty, but neither, unfortunately, are they
obsolete. Violent resistance to the planners and perpetrators of genocide, while
it is underway, is an incontestable right. Likewise, all peoples have the right to
resist aggressive war waged against them, if their resistance does not descend into
mass atrocity.
Beyond this, I offer only tentative comments about whether to support a given
movement that practices violence. I have strongly backed movements that used
violence to defend civilian populations, for positive social revolution, and for
national independence (the Sandinistas in Nicaragua; the FMLN guerrillas in
El Salvador; South Africa’s ANC; Fretilin in East Timor). I have also supported
state-led military interventions that suppressed genocide – Vietnam in Cambodia,
or NATO in Kosovo (though in the latter case, I criticized the military strategy,
based on high-altitude bombing, as cowardly and ineffective).
As Alan Kuperman has pointed out, however, violent resistance and military
intervention may provide just the “provocation” that would-be génocidaires are
seeking to implement their final solution. Thus, violence should be employed
only and truly in extremis, as a defensive response to manifestly intolerable
treatment. It is a cliché to say that non-violent means should be tried first, second,
and third. It becomes less of a cliché when we appreciate the enormous power of
non-violent resistance, which has toppled dictatorships around the world.
59
STRATEGIES OF INTERVENTION AND PREVENTION
403
■
CONCLUSION
This book has tried to provide an introduction to the concept and practice of geno-
cide. We have considered both genocide’s roots in antiquity and its manifestations
in modern and contemporary periods. The intimate relationships between genocide,
war, imperialism, and social revolution have been explored, together with diverse
social science perspectives on the phenomenon. We have examined how legal
institutions and mechanisms evolved to confront genocide; how genocides worked
their way into collective memory; and the role that gender plays.
One might express optimism or pessimism about the chances of establishing an
effective anti-genocide regime. But a mood changes nothing.
60
Anything in the human order that can be understood can be confronted. In
the case of a blight as pernicious and enduring as genocide, we are morally obliged
to do so. Actions taken today carry special significance, with so many human and
planetary issues demanding attention. To stage an effective confrontation, we need
to perceive the linkages between genocide and other pressing challenges. Hence, in
part, my preference for a broad and inclusive genocide framework, rather than a
conceptually restrictive or narrowly legalistic one. Meaningful “peace” cannot exist
alongside massive inequalities in wealth, health, and education. And it will do us little
good to suppress genocide and establish amity among peoples, if the Earth itself
finally rebels against the species that has done it so much ecocidal damage.
The odds of overcoming these multifarious challenges are impossible to estimate,
but I believe we have an obligation to face them squarely. I hope I have persuaded
you, if you needed persuading, that the struggle against genocide deserves a
prominent place on the human agenda. May I welcome you to the struggle?
■
FURTHER STUDY
John G. Heidenrich, How to Prevent Genocide: A Guide for Policymakers, Scholars, and
the Concerned Citizen. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001. Emphasizes military
intervention.
Leo Kuper, The Prevention of Genocide. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985.
Kuper’s second and final book on genocide focuses on UN performance and
preventive strategies.
PreventGenocide.org. http://www.preventgenocide.org. Indispensable resources and
prevention strategies.
Neal Riemer, ed., Protection Against Genocide: Mission Impossible? Westport, CT:
Praeger, 2000. Short, readable volume on genocide prevention.
Nicholas Wheeler, Saving Strangers: Humanitarian Intervention in International
Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Now the standard text on
humanitarian intervention.
STRATEGIES OF INTERVENTION AND PREVENTION
404
■
NOTES
1 Thomas Cushman, “Is Genocide Preventable? Some Theoretical Considerations,”
Journal of Genocide Research, 5: 4 (2003), pp. 528, 531.
2 John G. Heidenrich, How to Prevent Genocide: A Guide for Policymakers, Scholars, and the
Concerned Citizen (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001), p. 18.
3 Cushman, “Is Genocide Preventable?,” p. 525.
4 Barbara Harff, “No Lessons Learned from the Holocaust? Assessing Risks of Genocide
and Political Mass Murder since 1955,” American Political Science Review, 97: 1 (February
2003), p. 62.
5 Ervin Staub, “The Psychology of Bystanders, Perpetrators, and Heroic Helpers,” in
Leonard S. Newman and Ralph Erber, eds, Understanding Genocide: The Social Psychology
of the Holocaust (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 30.
6 Ervin Staub, The Roots of Evil: The Origins of Genocide and Other Group Violence
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 274.
7 Interview with Kal Holsti, Vancouver, BC, January 2001.
8 Ted Robert Gurr and Barbara Harff, Ethnic Conflict in World Politics (Boulder, CO:
Westview Press, 1994), p. 80.
9 For a constructive discussion of “the creation and evolution of caring, connection, and
nonaggression,” emphasizing education and socialization, see ch. 14 in Staub, The Roots
of Evil, pp. 274–84.
10 For an overview of the empirical evidence, see David Kopel, review of Jay Simkin et al.,
Lethal Laws (Milwaukee: Jews for the Preservation of Firearm Ownership, 1994), in New
York Law School Journal of International and Comparative Law, 15 (1995), pp. 355–98,
available at http://www.lethallaws.com/kopel.htm.
11 R. Charli Carpenter has deepened and problematized this framing of “vulnerability”
in important respects, emphasizing physical capacity as well as liability to violent
victimization. See Carpenter, “Women and Children First: Gender Norms and
Humanitarian Evacuation in the Balkans, 1991–1995,” International Organization, 57:
4 (Fall 2003), pp. 661–94.
12 See Adam Jones, “Genocide and Humanitarian Intervention: Incorporating the Gender
Variable,” Journal of Humanitarian Assistance, February 2002, http://www.jha.ac/articles/
a080.htm.
13 See Robert D. Kaplan, The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War
(New York: Random House, 2000).
14 International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (hereafter, ICISS), The
Responsibility to Protect (Ottawa, ON: International Development Research Centre,
2001), p. 19.
15 The European Union and the Organization of American States, two of the most vigorous
intergovernmental organizations, adopted charters or constitutional provisions requiring
that their members adhere to democratic standards and procedures. Both also have
judicial mechanisms with enforcement powers, though these are much more entrenched
in the EU than in the OAS. The EU, of course, is also a huge economic bloc, membership
in which brings tangible material benefits. It is intriguing to observe how the lure of entry
to the bloc has acted to dampen or divert conflict in two countries riven in the recent past
by intercommunal conflict (the Croatian case was cited in Chapter 8). From the 1970s
to the 1990s, the policy adopted by Turkey towards its large Kurdish minority in the
southeast of the country was very close to genocidal: tens of thousands killed, hundreds
of thousands uprooted, intensive suppression of Kurdish language and media, and so on.
Now, with negotiations for EU membership a real possibility, Turkey has adopted more
progressive – or at least less vicious – policies towards the Kurds. There seems no reason,
apart from lack of political will, why Russian membership in the EU, or Chinese
membership in the World Trade Organization, could not be made contingent on similar
policies towards Chechnya or Tibet.
STRATEGIES OF INTERVENTION AND PREVENTION
405
16 Richard Falk, “The Challenge of Genocide and Genocidal Politics in an Era of
Globalisation,” in Tim Dunne and Nicholas J. Wheeler, eds, Human Rights in Global
Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 191.
17 ICISS, The Responsibility to Protect, pp. 30–31.
18 “After the Armistice [of November 1918], the blockade was extended to the Baltic ports
and continued until the Allies were satisfied with German compliance with their
demands. The journalist Walter Duranty visited Lübeck in 1919 and found people living
on potatoes and black bread. They had no meat, butter, milk or eggs. A doctor told him
that 90 per cent of the children were anaemic or below weight, and that more than half
of them had rickets or tuberculosis....The senior German delegate at Versailles, Graf
Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau, expressed some of the [German] resentment: ‘The
hundreds of thousands of noncombatants who have perished since November 11 because
of the blockade were destroyed coolly and deliberately, after our opponents had won a
certain and assured victory. Think of that, when you speak of guilt and atonement.’”
Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 1999), pp. 65–66.
19 ICISS, The Responsibility to Protect, p. 29.
20 Annan quoted in ICISS, The Responsibility to Protect, p. 40.
21 ICISS, The Responsibility to Protect, p. 48.
22 Heidenrich, How to Prevent Genocide, p. 61.
23 Kenneth Roth, “Setting the Standard: Justifying Humanitarian Intervention,” Harvard
International Review (spring 2004), p. 59; emphasis added. For a similar (and earlier)
framing, see Nicholas Wheeler, Saving Strangers: Humanitarian Intervention in
International Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 33–34. Wheeler’s
book is the best argument for a “solidarist” approach to intervention in what he calls
“supreme humanitarian emergencies,” defined as “extraordinary situations where civilians
in another state are in imminent danger of losing their life or facing appalling hardship,
and where indigenous forces cannot be relied upon to end these violations of human
rights” (p. 50).
24 Mary Kaldor in “Humanitarian Intervention: A Forum,” The Nation, July 14, 2003,
p. 13. “The commission went on to argue that a gap between legality and legitimacy is
very dangerous and needs to be removed by specifying conditions for humanitarian
intervention.” This was the challenge taken up, not entirely successfully in my view, by
the ICISS.
25 Stephen Holmes, “Looking Away,” London Review of Books, November 14, 2002.
26 See Michael Parenti, To Kill a Nation: The Attack on Yugoslavia (London: Verso, 2000);
Noam Chomsky, The New Military Humanism: Lessons from Kosovo (Monroe, ME:
Common Courage Press, 1999); Philip Hammond and Edward S. Herman, eds,
Degraded Capability: The Media and the Kosovo Crisis (London: Pluto Press, 2000); and
Diana Johnstone, Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO, and Western Delusions (New York:
Monthly Review Press, 2003).
27 India relished the opportunity to deal a blow to its erstwhile rival Pakistan by severing its
eastern wing. It was also confronted by an unmanageable flood of refugees from the
genocide, as was Tanzania in the Ugandan case. (The regime that replaced Amin in
Uganda, that of Milton Obote, was also no less murderous than its predecessor.) Vietnam
had deep political rivalries with the Khmer Rouge, close ties to the Vietnamese minority
in Cambodia, and desires to establish itself as the regional hegemon. Member countries
of NATO were profoundly concerned by the security implications of hundreds of
thousands of Kosovar refugees destabilizing neighboring countries in a corner of Europe
that had already spawned one world war. Only in the East Timor case, I have argued (Box
7a), was moral suasion – brought to bear by morally imbued protests domestically and
abroad – truly decisive in persuading Australia to lead the intervention, when
considerations of realpolitik dictated otherwise. However, to the extent that it became
politically untenable for the Australian government to act otherwise, we may also argue
that practical considerations outweighed humanitarian ones.
STRATEGIES OF INTERVENTION AND PREVENTION
406
28 Alan J. Kuperman, “Humanitarian Hazard: Revisiting Doctrines of Intervention,”
Harvard International Review (spring 2004), p. 67.
29 Michael Hirsh, “Calling All Regio-Cops: Peacekeeping’s Hybrid Future,” Foreign Affairs
(November–December 2000), p. 5.
30 Israel W. Charny, “An International Peace Army: A Proposal for the Long-range Future,”
in Charny, ed., The Encyclopedia of Genocide (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 1999),
p. 650.
31 Charny, “An International Peace Army,” pp. 650–52.
32 Charny, “An International Peace Army,” p. 650.
33 Dallaire quoted in Heidenrich, How to Prevent Genocide, pp. 200–1. Heidenrich’s ch. 12,
“The Evolution of an Idea,” explores the various proposals for a UN standing force.
34 An Economist reviewer notes, for example, “the stunning success of the EU in
democratising and liberalising its near neighbours, by the simple expedient of holding
out the carrot of membership.” “An Optimist’s View,” The Economist, February 26,
2005.
35 See Tim Pippard and Veronica Lie, “Enhancing the Rapid Reaction Capability of the
United Nations: Exploring the Options,” United Nations Association-UK, July 2004,
http://www.una-uk.org/UNandC/rapidreaction.html.
36 See, e.g., the analysis of a British government Green Paper on the subject in “Peace-
keeping ‘Role’ for Mercenaries,” BBC Online, February 13, 2002, http://news.bbc.co.uk/
1/hi/uk_politics/1817495.stm.
37 Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope (New York: Modern Library, 1999), p. 383.
38 Ian Hunter, “A Tale of Truth and Two Journalists,” in William L. Hewitt, ed., Defining
the Horrific: Readings on Genocide and Holocaust in the Twentieth Century (Upper Saddle
River, NJ: Pearson Education, 2004), p. 134.
39 Muggeridge quoted in Hunter, “A Tale of Truth,” p. 135; emphasis added.
40 Muggeridge quoted in Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow: Collectivization and the
Terror-Famine (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 260.
41 Samantha Power, “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide (New York:
Basic Books, 2002), p. 32.
42 Staub, The Roots of Evil, p. 282.
43 Quoted in Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy
Networks in International Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), p. 19;
emphasis added. For an overview of the history and activities of Amnesty International,
see Jonathan Power, Like Water on Stone: The Story of Amnesty International (London:
Penguin, 2002).
44 Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History (London: Penguin, 2003), p. 497. The contribution
of artists, writers, and other shapers of cultural form also provides a potent form of
witnessing, albeit usually at some remove from events. It would be hard to overstate the
importance of films such as Schindler’s List and The Killing Fields in conscientizing mass
publics to the Jewish and Cambodian genocides, respectively. “Norm entrepreneurs”
(ch. 12) frequently use books – both non-fiction and fiction – to confront genocide and
other crimes against humanity. Sometimes these can become true “culture carriers.”
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin alerted millions of nineteenth-century readers
to slavery’s depredations; in contemporary times, Jonathan Schell’s The Fate of the Earth
strongly inspired the anti-nuclear movement. Finally, though they are always vulnerable
to charges of grandstanding, celebrities have brought important visibility to genocide’s
victims or potential victims – as with Richard Gere and Tibet, or Sting with the rainforest
Indians of Brazil.
45 Irene Gut Opdyke with Jennifer Armstrong, In My Hands: Memories of a Holocaust
Rescuer (New York: Anchor Books, 2001).
46 The controversy over the Catholic Church’s actions during the Jewish Holocaust may be
revisited in this context (see Chapter 6).
47 Quoted in Peter Balakian, The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s
Response (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), p. 121.
STRATEGIES OF INTERVENTION AND PREVENTION
407
48 Charles Tilly, The Politics of Collective Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2003), p. 8; see also Barrington Moore, Moral Persecution in History (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2000).
49 The term “cosmopolitan” was first deployed in the modern era by Immanuel Kant in a
classic essay, Perpetual Peace (1795). Mary Kaldor “use[s] the term...to refer both to a
positive political vision, embracing tolerance, multiculturalism, civility and democracy,
and to a more legalistic respect for certain overriding universal principles which should
guide political communities at various levels, including the global level.” Kaldor, New
and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 2001), p. 116. See also the discussion of “the re-emergence of cosmopolitanism”
in David Hirsh, Law against Genocide: Cosmopolitan Trials (London: Glasshouse Press,
2003), pp. 13–17; and S. Vertovec and R. Cohen, eds, Conceiving Cosmopolitanism
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
50 Ethan Nadelmann claims that “no other international prohibition regime so powerfully
confirms the potential of humanitarian and similar moral concerns to shape global norms
as does the regime against slavery and the slave trade.” Nadelmann, “Global Prohibition
Regimes: The Evolution of Norms in International Society,” International Organization,
44: 4 (fall 1990), available at http://www.criminology.fsu.edu/transcrime/articles/Global
ProhibitionRegimes.htm.
51 For a grisly description of the kinds of public execution common in “civilized” Europe
as recently as the eighteenth century, see the opening pages of Michel Foucault’s
Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1979) – but not before
lunch.
52 John Boli and George M. Thomas, “INGOs and the Organization of World Culture,”
in Boli and Thomas, eds, Constructing World Culture: International Nongovernmental
Organizations since 1875 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), pp. 39–40.
53 Testimony quoted in Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow, p. 233. Nadezhda Mandelstam
wrote of “this craving for an all-embracing idea which would explain everything in the
world and bring about universal harmony at one go.” Under Stalinism, “Life was
deviating from the blueprints, but the blueprints had been declared sacrosanct and it was
forbidden to compare them with what was actually coming into being.” Mandelstam,
Hope Against Hope, pp. 115, 163.
54 Ruby Plenty Chiefs quoted in Martha Minow, Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing
History after Genocide and Mass Violence (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1998), p. 8.
55 Donald E. Miller and Lorna Touryan Miller, Survivors: An Oral History of the Armenian
Genocide (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999), p. 5.
56 Guevara letter reproduced in the Museo Ernesto Che Guevara, Alta Gracia, Argentina;
my translation.
57 Feldman quoted in Liisa H. Malkki, “Speechless Emissaries: Refugees, Humanitarianism,
and Dehistoricization,” in Alexander Laban Hinton, ed., Genocide: An Anthropological
Reader (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002), p. 353.
58 Stalin quoted in David Remnick, Resurrection: The Struggle for a New Russia (New York:
Vintage, 1998), p. 288.
59 The lives and writings of twentieth-century figures such as Mahatma Gandhi, Martin
Luther King, the Dalai Lama, and Aung San Suu Kyi provide important insights and
inspiration, as does Jonathan Schell’s recent study, The Unconquerable World: Power,
Nonviolence, and the Will of the People (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2003). See also
Peter Ackerman and Jack DuVall, A Force More Powerful: A Century of Nonviolent Conflict
(New York: Palgrave, 2000).
60 As Noam Chomsky put it: “There is no measure of how optimistic you ought to be. In
fact, as far as optimism is concerned, you basically have two [options]. You can say,
‘Nothing is going to work, and so I am not going to do anything.’ You can therefore
guarantee that the worst possible outcomes will come about. Or, you can take the other
position. You can say: ‘Look, maybe something will work. Therefore, I will engage myself
in trying to make it work and maybe there is a chance that things can get better.’ That is
STRATEGIES OF INTERVENTION AND PREVENTION
408
your choice. Nobody can tell how right it is to be optimistic. Nothing can be predicted
in human affairs...nothing.” “An Interactive Session with Noam Chomsky,” Asian
College of Journalism, Chennai, India, http://www.greenmac.com/World_Events/
aninterac.html.
STRATEGIES OF INTERVENTION AND PREVENTION
409
410
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission
(Australia), 381
Aborigines, as victims of British/Australian
genocide, 78–80
Abu Ghraib (prison), 275, 333, 354
Adorno, Theodor, 261
Aegis Trust, 254
Afghanistan
as country at risk of genocide, 310
Soviet imperialism in, 47–48, 315
African National Congress (ANC), 403
African Union (AU), 255
African Standby Force, 397
Agamemnon (king), 4
AIDS
and genocidal rape, 246
as genocide, 37 (n. 76)
AK-47, see Kalashnikov
Akazu (little house) (Rwanda), 236
Akayesu, Jean Paul, legal case against, 21, 245,
328, 330, 367
Akçam, Taner, 115
Aktion T-4, see Euthanasia
al-Bashir, Omar, 253–54
al-Majd, Ali Hassan, 119–20, 122
Al-Qaeda, 27
Albigensian crusade (France), 5
Albright, Madeleine, 26
Alfonsín, Raúl, 346, 348
Algeria, French imperialism in, 46, 322 (n. 18)
Allende, Salvador, 371
Alvarez, Alex, xxii
American Servicemembers Protection Act, 375
Amin, Hafizullah, 47
Amnesty International, 399
Anderson, Benedict, 291
Anfal Campaign, 119–23, 300
atrocities against children, women, and elderly,
121
gendercide against men, 120–21, 327
see also Kurds
Anger, Per, 276, 277
Angkor empire, 186, 190
Angola
Portuguese imperialism in, 48
war in, 48
Annan, Kofi, 209, 233
Annihilation Order, see Vernichtungsbefehl
Anthropology
and cultural relativism, 297–98
distinguished from sociology, 288
forensic anthropology, 299–300
methodology of, 296–98
perspectives on genocide, 296–301, 305–06
under Nazis, 297
Anti-semitism
in Europe, 148–50, 157, 352
in France, 165 (n. 11)
in Germany, 149
in Poland, 9, 131
in Soviet Union, 135
see also “Doctors’ Plot”; Hitler, Adolf; Jewish
Holocaust; Nazis; Protocols of the Elders of
Zion
Anyidoho, Henry Kwami, 233
Apartheid Debt and Reparations Campaign, 380
Apology, as form of redress, 380–81
Arbenz, Jacobo, 77
Arendt, Hannah, 147, 158
Arévalo, Juan José, 77
Argentina
Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team, 301
“disappearances” in, 346
genocide in, 346–48, 359 (n. 5)
■
INDEX
INDEX
411
struggle over memory in, 346–48
national trials in, 369
truth commission in, 378
see also Nunca Más report
Armenia
as independent state, 112
early history of, 102
see also Armenian genocide; Armenians
Armenian genocide, xx, 30, 101–19, 264,
268–69, 283 (n. 19), 285 (n. 49), 321
(n. 7), 398–99
and Jewish Holocaust, 101, 174, 323 (n. 36)
and term “holocaust,” 102
as influence on Raphael Lemkin, 9
atrocities against children and women in,
108–09, 109–12
criminal trials following, 112–13, 364
denial of, 113–15, 352–54
gendercide against men in, 104, 106, 109–10,
217
in context of First World War, 53
post-genocide trials for, 9, 364, 369
see also Armenia; Armenians
Armenians
as “middleman minority,” 295, 296
compared with Jews, 102–03
deportations of, 106–07, 11–12
destruction of culture of, 107
early massacres of, 104, 363
historical origins of, 102
massacres by, 112
renaissance of, 103–04
see also Armenia; Armenian genocide
Arthur, Sir George, 93 (n. 74)
Arusha Peace Accords, 237
Arusha tribunal, see International Criminal
Tribunal for Rwanda
“Asocials,” as targets of genocide, 169–70, 178,
391
Assassination, as prohibition regime, 324 (n. 43)
Assyrian empire, 5, 51
Assyrians, as victims of Turkish genocide, 106
Ataturk, Kemal, see Kemal, Mustafa
Aung San Suu Kyi, 408 (n. 59)
Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp (Poland), 153,
154, 156, 177, 239, 276
debate over bombing of, 159
Australia
denial of genocide in, 354
genocide in, 69, 78–80
intervention in East Timor, 396, 406–07
(n. 27)
Labor Party in, 80
redress and restitution strategies in, 381
residential schools in, 79
“Sorry Day” in, 79–80, 381
Avdic, Nezad, 218–19
Awami League (Bangladesh), 228–29
Aztec empire, 71, 84
Ba’ath Party (Iraq), 120, 122
Babi Yar massacre (Ukraine), 239
Baker, James, 220
Balkans, see Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo,
Slovenia, Yugoslavia
Balkars, 134
“Banality of evil” (Arendt), 147
Bandung Conference, 187
Bangladesh
aftermath of genocide in, 230
gendercide against men in, 229, 327, 328
genocide in, xix, 227–31
genocide legislation in, 369
independence of, 229–30
rape of women in, 230, 330
Bardach, Janusz, 131–33
Bartov, Omer, 54
Barzani clan (Iraq), 120
Battle of Hamakari (Namibia), 80
Bauman, Zygmunt, 274, 288, 289–91
Bauer, Yehuda, 16
Baumeister, Roy, xxii, 261
Becker, Ernest, 283 (n. 30)
Belgium
colonialism in Congo, 42–44
colonialism in Rwanda, 234–36
communal cleavages in, 390
Belo, Bishop, 208
Belzec death camp (Poland), 153, 173
Bengalis, as victims of Pakistani genocide, 227–31
Bergen-Belsen concentration camp (Germany),
154
Berg, Nick, 50
Biafra, as disputed genocide, 357
Bielakowski, Alexander, 82
Biharis, as victims of Pakistani genocide, 227–28,
231 (n. 12)
bin Laden, Osama, 270
Bisesero mountain, massacres and resistance at
(Rwanda), 242
“Black Widows” (Chechnya), 144
Blair, Tony, 371
Boas, Franz, 297
Bolivia, 29, 71–72, 85, 86, 304 (n. 32)
INDEX
412
Bolshevik Party, 125
and Great Purge, 129–31
as object of Nazi genocide, 169, 174, 267, 269
Bolshevik Revolution, 55, 124–26, 141
and First World War, 53, 55
see also Bolshevik Party; Lenin, Vladimir; Soviet
Union
Bombing, aerial
as genocide, 24–25, 29, 36 (n. 62)
debate over bombing of Auschwitz-Birkenau,
159
nuclear bombing, 25, 29, 56–58
of Cambodia, 46, 188–90
of Germany, 24–25, 29, 179
of Laos, 46
of Japan, 24–25, 29
of Vietnam, 46
de Bonafini, Hebe, 346
Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 172
Bonior, David, 26
Bosnia-Herzegovina
aftermath of genocide in, 222–24
as disputed genocide, 357
declaration of independence of, 215
foreign role in, 219–20
gendercide against men in, 215–17, 327, 328,
368, 384 (n. 27)
genocide in, 29, 212–27, 368
humanitarian intervention in, 392
Muslim population of, 215
rape of women in, 215–16, 329–30
Serb population of, 215
see also Sarajevo; Srebrenica massacre
Brandt, Willi, 380
Brantlinger, Patrick, 68
Brass, Paul, 293–94
Bristol, Mark, 294
Bringing Them Home (report), 79
British empire, 40–42, 72–73
Bronfman, Edgar, 379
Browne, J. Ross, 75
Browning, Christopher, 160–61, 270–71, 275
Brownmiller, Susan, 230, 330
Bryce Report (Canada), 76
Buchenwald concentration camp (Germany), 178
Buddhists, as victims of Cambodian genocide,
199
Bukharin, Nikolai, 130
Bureaucracy
and modernity, 289–90, 291
in China, 291
Burleigh, Michael, 82
Burundi
genocide in, 30, 248 (n. 24), 266
Bush, George H.W., 220
Bush, George W., 372
and International Criminal Court, 375
Butz, Arthur, 352
Cabo, José Martínez, 67, 68
Cambodia
“base people” vs. “new people” in, 194–95
Chinese policy towards, 201
forced labor in, 197–98
genocide in, 185–206
genocide legislation in, 369
mass executions in, 198
“mixed tribunal” in, 370
political purges in, 198–99
relations with Vietnam, 186, 188, 191, 199,
200–01
urbicide in, 192–93, 195
US policy towards, 188–90, 201
war in, 188–92
Canada
and recognition of Armenian genocide, 114
and standing UN army, 397
denial of genocide in, 361 (n. 37)
genocide in, 72–76
genocide legislation in, 369
redress and restitution processes in, 381
residential schools in, 75–76
Capitalism, and genocide, 37 (n. 80), 376, 401
Carpenter, R. Charli, 405 (n. 11)
Carrier, Jean-Baptiste, 6
Carthage, destruction of, 5, 50, 193
de las Casas, Bartolomé, 70, 71
as honest witness, 400
Casement, Sir Roger, 44
Caste War of Yucatán (Mexico), 29, 85, 87, 304
(n. 32)
Castro, Fidel, 372
Catalyzing ideas, 317
Celibici case (ICTY), 367
Cerro Rico silver mine (Bolivia), 72
Chad, truth commission in, 378
Chalk, Frank, xxii, 14, 15, 17
Chams, as victims of Cambodian genocide, 199
Charny, Israel, 15, 18, 261, 396–97
Chechnya
deportations from, 134–35, 351
gendercide against men in, 143, 327
genocide in, 134–35, 141–46, 193, 351
Cheka secret police (Soviet Union), 126
INDEX
413
Chelmno death camp (Poland), 153, 178
Cherokee Indians (US), 75, 315
Chétés (brigands), 107, 108, 353
see also Armenian genocide
Chetniks (Yugoslavia), 213, 218, 219
Chhit Do, 189
Chiapas (Mexico), uprising in, see Zapatistas
Chickasaw Indians (US), 315
Chile, see Pinochet, Augusto
China
agricultural collectivization in, 95–96
and collective pathological narcissism, 263
and genocide in Tibet, 94–100
as “lethal regime,” 309
bureaucracy in, 291
ethnic sensibility in, 291
famine in, 96
female infanticide in, 331
Japanese genocide in, 44–45
policy toward Cambodia, 201
“Rape of Nanjing,” 44
see also Mao Zedong
Chinese
as “middleman minority,” 295
as victims of genocide by Japanese, 44–45
as victims of genocide in Cambodia, 200
denial of genocide against, 360 (n. 23)
in Malaysia, 391
Chivington, John, 73
Choctaw Indians (US), 315
Chomsky, Noam, 210 (n. 1), 356, 357, 408–09
(n. 60)
Christian Democratic International, 237
Christians, persecution of, 5, 9
Chua, Amy, 295
Churchill, Ward, 35 (n. 48), 75–76
Churchill, Winston, 8, 317, 364
Citizens’ tribunals, see International citizens’
tribunals
Clinton, Bill, 309
and Armenian genocide, 115
and Bosnian genocide, 220
and International Criminal Court, 375
and Rwandan genocide, 244, 247 (n. 9), 381,
387 (n. 92)
Cold War, 58, 311–12, 313, 319, 365, 392
Collective pathological narcissism, see Narcissism
Collectivization of agriculture
in China, 95–96
in Soviet Union, 127–28, 189, 401
Colombia, vigilante violence in 332
Colonialism, 19
and ethnic nationalism, 292
and genocide, 19, 39–48, 94, 315, 322
(n. 18)
and “middleman minorities,” 294–95, 492
defined, 39
internal colonialism, 39–40
neo-colonialism, 39–40
prohibition regime against, 400
settler colonialism, 39–40, 83–84
see also Decolonization; Imperialism
Columbus, Christopher, 6, 77, 86
“Comfort women,” 45, 330, 339 (n. 22)
International citizens’ tribunal for, 376
Commission of Inquiry into the Origins of the
Reichstag Fire, 376
Committee of Public Safety (France), 7
Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), 104,
105, 106
see also Armenian genocide; Young Turks
Communism
and genocide, 94–100, 124–46, 185–206, 309,
401
and genocide in Cambodia, 185–206
and genocide in China, 94–100
as revolutionary force, 55
in France, 186–87
in Indochina, 188
in Soviet Union, 124–41, 190, 345
in United States, 356
Communists
as victims of Stalinist purges, 129–31, 345
as victims of Nazis, 169
Comparative genocide studies, 14–30
and Jewish Holocaust, 14, 157, 163
Complex humanitarian emergencies, 313
Conan Doyle, Sir Arthur, 44
Congo
as “Africa’s world war,” 252, 396
as country at risk of genocide, 310
as “new war,” 252
Belgian genocide in, 42–44, 102, 250, 363
contemporary genocide in, 44, 244, 250–52,
254–57
possible truth commission in, 378
Congo Free State, 42
Congo Reform Association, 44
Congolese Rally for Democracy (RCD) (Congo),
252
Conrad, Joseph, 39, 42, 44
Constantinople tribunal (Turkey), 364, 369
Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of
the Crime of Genocide (UN), 12–14, 19,
INDEX
414
22, 23, 27, 83, 85, 144, 237, 308, 354,
357, 362, 374
and incorporation into domestic law, 369–70
and political/social groups, 13–14, 137
lobbying for by Raphael Lemkin, 317–18
preamble to, 22
Corddry, Rob, 354
Corvée labor – see Forced labor
Cosmopolitanism, 400, 408 (n. 49)
see also World citizen
Cossacks, as victims of Soviet genocide, 140
(n. 51)
de Cotí, Otilia Lux, 86
Creek Indians (US), 315
Crimean Tatars, as victims of Soviet genocide, 134
Crimes against humanity, 112, 363, 374–75, 383
(n. 8)
and genocide, 374, 385 (n. 57)
Criminal tribunals, 363–71, 373–75
Croatia
conquest of Krajina region, 220
declaration of independence of, 214–15
expulsion of Serbs from, 29
genocide during Second World War in, 212,
354
Ustashe regime in, 212, 213, 266
Crusades, 5
Cuban Missile Crisis, 135
Cultural genocide, 10–11, 22
Cultural relativism, 297–98
Cultural Revolution, see Great Proletarian
Cultural Revolution
Cushman, Thomas, 388
Dachau concentration camp (Germany), 169,
171, 177
Dadrian, Vahakn, 15
Dalai Lama, 95, 96, 98, 408 (n. 59)
Dallaire, Roméo, 232, 233, 238, 239, 335, 397
Dardanelles campaign (Turkey), 105, 113
Darfur
as disputed genocide, 357
as “new war,” 311
compared with Bosnia-Herzegovina and
Kosovo, 254
gendercide against me in, 254
genocide in, 252–57
rape of women in, 254
Davis, Leslie, 101, 107
Davis, Mike, 41–42
Day of Fallen Diplomats (Turkey), 354
Dayton Accords, 220, 223, 366
Death camps, 152–54, 242, 318
see also Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Chelmno,
Kabgayi, Majdanek, Sobibor, Treblinka
Declaration of Human Rights (UN), 8
Decolonization, 85, 206–07, 236, 292, 297
Delhi massacre (India), 327–28
Demjanjuk, John, trial of, 369
Democide, 307–09, 314, 316
Democracy
and genocide, 263–64, 296, 309–10, 312,
314–16
Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda
(FDLR) (Congo), 236
Democratic Kampuchea, see Cambodia
Democratic peace debate, 314
Denial, see Genocide denial
Denmark
and rescue of Jews from Nazis, 275–76
and standing UN army, 397
Dergue regime, see Ethiopia
Dewey Commission, 376
Dickmann, August, 172
Dien Bien Phu, battle of (Vietnam), 188
Dili massacre (East Timor), 208
Disease, and genocide against indigenous peoples,
73, 83
“Doctors’ Plot” (Soviet Union), 135
Doctors Without Borders, 399
Dönitz, Karl, 364
Dowry killings, 331
Drost, Peter, 15
Drug trade
and economic sanctions, 393
and “new wars,” 313, 322 (n. 16)
as prohibition regime, 318, 319
Dubrovnik, bombardment of (Croatia), 215
Dudayev, Dzhokar, 142
Dunand, Henri, 363
Duranty, Walter, 398
Durban Conference, see World Conference
against Racism
Dzhugashvili, Joseph, see Stalin, Joseph
East Pakistan, see Bangladesh
East Timor
as disputed genocide, 357
compared to Cambodian genocide, 206
compared to Kosovo, 210
gendercide against men in, 327
genocide in, 206–11
humanitarian intervention in, 392, 396, 406
(n. 27)
INDEX
415
independence of, 209–10
Indonesian invasion of, 208
justice process in, 210, 211 (n. 13)
solidarity movement for, 206, 208–09
East Timor Action Network (ETAN), 209
Eastern Slavonia region (Croatia), 214
Ecocide, 404
Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC),
86
Economic Community of West African States
(ECOWAS), 396
Economic sanctions, see Sanctions, economic
Ecuador, 86
Ehrenburg, Ilya, 54
Ehrenreich, Barbara, 265–66
Ehrhardt, Sophie, 297
Eichmann, Adolf, 147, 154, 362, 369, 372, 384
(n. 31)
Einsatzkommando, see Einsatzgruppen
Einsatzgruppen (Mission Groups), 120, 152, 174,
178, 383 (n. 6)
Eisenhower, Dwight, 25, 77
El Mozote massacre (El Salvador), 301
El Salvador
genocide in, 301
FMLN guerrillas in, 403
truth commission in, 377
Eliticide
in Armenian genocide, 106
in Bangladeshi genocide, 227, 229
in Burundi, 266
in Poland, 131, 172
Elizabeth II (queen), 380, 381
Enabling Act (Germany), 149
Enver Pasha, 105, 113
Epstein, Nechama, 155–57
Ethiopia
famine crimes in, 41
national trials in, 362, 368, 369, 372
“Ethnic cleansing”
in Bosnia-Herzegovina, 216
in Kosovo, 222
in Darfur, 254
Ethnic conflict
and end of Cold War, 311–12
and genocide, 310
and “middleman minorities,” 294–96
and “new wars,” 313
deadly ethnic riots, 293–94, 304 (n. 27)
sociological perspectives on, 291–93
Ethnicity, xxiii, 291–93
Ethnocentrism, 297, 305 (n. 44)
Ethnocide, 22
Eugenics
in Europe and United States, 172–73
in Nazi Germany, 172–73
European Court of Justice (ECJ), 373
European Union (EU), 115, 222, 373, 397,
405–06 (n. 15)
Rapid Reaction Force (ERRF), 397
European witch-hunts, xix
Euthanasia
in Nazi Germany, 172–74, 182 (n. 27)
in Poland and Soviet Union, 173–74
Evian Conference (France), 159
“Exclusivity of suffering” (Halo), 360 (n. 29)
Falklands/Malvinas war, 263, 346
Famine crimes and starvation, 329, 401
in British India, 41–42
in Cambodia, 197–98
in China, 41, 96, 192
in East Timor, 208
in Ethiopia, 41
in Germany after First World War, 322 (n. 18),
406 (n. 18)
in North Korea, 41
in Ukraine, 124, 127–28, 136–37, 398
see also Collectivization of agriculture
Fanon, Frantz, 186, 187
Fascism
and Nazi genocide, 147–84
as revolutionary force, 55
see also Hitler, Adolf; Nazis
Faurisson, Robert, 352, 355, 356, 357
Fear
animal fear, 265–66
as factor in genocide, 261, 265–68
existential dread, 265, 267–68
mortal terror, 265–67
in Balkans wars, 266
in Jewish Holocaust, 267
in Rwandan genocide, 266–67
Fein, Helen, 14, 17, 18, 47–48, 288
Feminism, 325
Filtration camps (Chechnya), 143–44
First World War, 51–53, 56, 363, 393
aftermath of, 112–13, 149, 364
and Adolf Hitler, 52–53, 149, 269
and Armenian genocide, 105–06, 268
and Bolshevik revolution, 125
and creation of Yugoslavia, 212
and Nazi rise to power, 159
criminal tribunals following, 364, 369
INDEX
416
see also Dardanelles campaign; Somme, battle
of; Versailles Treaty
Fischer, Eugen, 81, 297
Flinders Island (Australia), 79, 91–92 (n. 52)
Flossenburg concentration camp (German), 172
Forced labor
and slavery, 318
as gendercidal institution, 331
in Belgian Congo, 42–44
in Cambodia, 197–98
in Japanese empire, 45
in Soviet Union, 128–29
in Spanish empire, 70–72, 83
in Tibet, 96
Forensic anthropology, see Anthropology
France
and recognition of Armenian genocide, 114
imperialism of, 46, 186, 322 (n. 18)
revolution in, 6–7, 55, 291
role in Rwandan genocide, 236–37, 244, 249
(n. 51), 357, 393
Vichy regime, 165 (n. 11), 187
Fretelin (East Timor), 207–08, 403
Freud, Sigmund, and “narcissism of minor
differences,” 262
Friedman, Thomas, 268
Friedrich, Jörg, 179
Fromm, Erich, 261
Functionalism, see Jewish Holocaust
Gacaca proceedings (Rwanda), 245, 370–71, 377,
380
Gallipoli, see Dardanelles campaign
Galtung, Johan, 27, 28
Gandhi, Mahatma, 227, 408 (n. 59)
Garreton, Robert, 252
Garzón, Baltasar, 371
Gas chambers, 152–53, 318, 329
Gatwaro stadium massacre (Rwanda), 242
Gellately, Robert, 150, 169–70
Gender
and genocide, 5, 325–41, 367–68
definitions of, 325–26
Gendercide, 5, 27, 325–41
against Albanian men in Kosovo, 221–22, 327
against Bosnian-Muslim men, 215–17, 327,
328, 368, 384 (n. 27)
against Chinese men in Nanjing, 329
against homosexual men in Nazi Germany,
170–71, 331–32
against Jewish men in Holocaust, 152, 267,
329, 334
against Melian men, 326
against men in Armenian genocide, 104, 106,
109–10, 217
against men in Anfal Campaign, 120–21,
327
against men in Bangladesh, 229, 327, 328
against men in Chechnya, 143, 327
against men in Darfur, 254
against men in East Timor, 327
against men in Kashmir/Punjab, 327
against men in Rwanda, 242, 244
against Soviet prisoners-of-war, 175–77
against women, 329–31
and early-warning mechanisms, 392
and root-and-branch genocide, 326–29
gendercidal institutions, 27, 330–31
see also Delhi massacre; Srebrenica massacre
Gendercide Watch (organization), xix
Geneva Conventions, 319, 363
Geneva Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use in
War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or Other
Gases, and of Bacteriological Methods of
Warfare, 364
“Genocidal continuum” (Scheper-Hughes), 299
Genocidal massacres, 27, 37 (n. 73)
against indigenous peoples, 73
Genocidal rape, see Rape
Genocide
against Poles, see Poland
against Ukrainians, see Ukraine
agents of, 19
and authority, 403
and bodily or mental harm, 13, 361 (n. 37)
and capitalism, 37 (n. 80), 376, 401
and colonialism, 19, 39–48, 94, 315
and communism, 94–100, 124–46, 185–206,
309, 401
and crimes against humanity, 374, 385
(n. 57)
and democracy, 263–64, 296, 309–10, 312,
314–16
and denial, 113–14, 351–57
and economic crisis, 389
and economic sanctions, 26
and education, 402
and fear, see Fear
and filth/excreta, 284 (n. 43), 299–300,
305–06 (n. 53)
and forgetting, 345–51
and gender, 5, 325–41, 367–68
and globalization, 42, 292–93, 313, 393
and gratuitous cruelty, 269
INDEX
417
and greed, see Greed
and group identity, 4, 12, 14, 262, 266, 289,
291–93, 367, 389–90
and gun control, 391
and hate propaganda, 390–91
and honest witness, 398–99
and humiliation, see Humiliation
and imperialism/colonialism, 39–48
and intent, 20–22, 353
and justice, 362–87
and/as mass killing, 11, 13
and measures to prevent births, 14
and memory, 345–51
and modernity, 289–91
and narcissism, see Narcissism
and nuclear “omnicide,” 56–58
and political groups, 14, 319
and prevention of births within a group, 13,
368
and redress, 379–81
and religion, 4, 159–60, 185, 191, 273, 278,
279, 280, 400
and restitution, 379–81
and secular ideologies, 400–02
see also Capitalism; Communism; Modernity
and social revolution, 55–56
and structural violence, 27–28, 393
and truth and reconciliation processes, 377–79
and universal jurisdiction, 362
and war, 48–54
anthropological perspectives on, xxiii, 288–89,
296–301, 305–06
apologies for, 380–81
as crime against humanity, see Crimes against
humanity
as jus cogens offense, 362
as prohibition regime, 316–20
attempted justifications of, 28–30, 68–69, 105,
113–14
celebration of, 81–82
central direction of, 353
cinematic treatments of, 15, 156, 205 (n. 52),
276, 278, 407 (n. 44)
criminal tribunals for, 363–71, 373–75
cultural dimension of, 10–11
degrees of, 35 (n. 48), 83
dehumanization strategies in, 267, 299
denial of, see Genocide denial
emotional impact of studying, xx, xxv–xxvi
(n. 3)
goals of, 20
historical perspectives, xxiii
in Australia, see Australia
in the Americas, 70–77
in Bangladesh, see Bangladesh
in Bosnia-Herzegovina, see Bosnia-Herzegovina
in Cambodia, see Cambodia
in Congo, see Congo
in Croatia, see Croatia
in Darfur, see Darfur
in East Timor, see East Timor
in El Salvador, 301
in Guatemala, see Guatemala
in Iraq, see Iraq
in Kosovo, see Kosovo
in Namibia, see Namibia
in prehistory, antiquity, and early modernity,
3–6
in revolutionary France, see France
in Russia, see Chechnya; Soviet Union
in Rwanda, see Rwanda
in self-defense, 30, 352
in Soviet Union, see Second World War; Soviet
Union
in Sudan, see Sudan
in Tasmania, 78–79
in Turkey, see Armenian genocide
in wartime and peacetime, 13
in Zulu empire, 7–8
international citizens’ tribunals for, 375–76
intervention strategies for, 388–409
legal definitions of, 12–14, 366–70
literary treatments of, 407 (n. 44)
military intervention in, 395–97, 403
origins
as historical phenomenon, 3–8
as legal-analytical concept, 8–18
political science perspectives on, 307–24
preventive strategies for, 15, 388–409
psychological perspectives on, xxiii, 261–87
Raphael Lemkin’s definition of, 10–11
root-and-branch genocide, 326–29
scale of, 20
scholarly definitions of, 10, 14–22
sociological perspectives on, xxiii, 288–96,
302–05
strategies of, 20
tribunals for, see Genocide and war-crimes
tribunals
use of violence to confront, 403
victims of, 19, 30, 38 (n. 86)
warning signs of, 389–92
see also Convention on the Prevention and
Punishment of the Crime of Genocide;
Democide, Eliticide, Gendercide,
Politicide, Subaltern genocide, Urbicide
Genocide and war-crimes tribunals, 46
in Cambodia, 200–02
in Constantinople, 112–13
in Indonesia/East Timor, 210, 211 (n. 13)
in Iraq, 122
in Rwanda, 245–46
see also Citizens’ tribunals; Gacaca; International
Criminal Court; International Criminal
Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia;
International Criminal Tribunal for
Rwanda; Nuremberg tribunal; Tokyo
tribunal
Genocide Convention, see Convention on the
Prevention and Punishment of the Crime
of Genocide
Genocide denial, 351–57
and free speech, 354–57
of Armenian genocide, 113–15
of genocide against indigenous peoples, 81–82
Genocide Memorial Day, 106
see also Armenian genocide
Genocide memorials, 359 (n. 8)
see also Memory; Museum of Memory
Genscher, Hans-Dietrich, 219
Gere, Richard, 407 (n. 44)
German-Baghdad Railway, 111
German South-West Africa, see Namibia
Germans
as victims in Second World War, 179–80
as “willing executioners” in Jewish Holocaust,
160–61, 270–71
as witnesses of Armenian genocide, 398–99
expulsions of ethnic Germans, 29, 180, 381
in Volga region of Soviet Union, 134
Germany
and Nazism/Second World War, 147, 149–84
and Bolshevik revolution, 125
colonialism in Rwanda, 234
economic sanctions against, 393, 406 (n. 18)
national trials in, 364, 369
see also Bombing, aerial
Gikondo, massacre of (Rwanda), 238–39
Gisenyi, massacre of (Rwanda), 239
Gladstone, William, 103, 363, 400
Globalization, 42, 292–93, 393
of warfare, 313
Goering, Hermann, 81, 177
Gökalp, Ziya, 105
Goldhagen, Daniel, 271
“Goldhagen debate,” 160–61
Goldstein, Joshua, 325–26
Goldstone, Richard, 395
Goma, humanitarian crisis in (Zaire), 250
Gorbachev, Mikhail, 135, 141
Gotovina, Ante, 223, 366
Grass, Günter, 179
Gray, Charles, 355
Great Britain
and collective pathological narcissism, 263
and “middleman minorities,” 294
imperialism of, 40–42, 72–73
revolution in, 55
Great Depression, 149, 269
Great Leap Forward (China), 96, 191
Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (China),
96–97
Great Purge (Soviet Union), 129–31
Greater Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, 45, 360
(n. 23)
Greed
and power/prestige, 265
as factor in genocide, 106–07, 261, 296
in Armenian genocide, 106–07, 264, 283
(n. 19)
in Jewish Holocaust, 264, 265
in Rwandan genocide, 243, 264–65
in Soviet Union, 130, 264, 265
Greeks, as victims of Turkish genocide, 106, 117
(n. 27)
Grozny, destruction of (Chechnya), 142–43
Guantánamo Bay (Cuba), 275
Guatemala
as disputed genocide, 357
genocide in, 77, 85, 296, 301
Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Team, 301
Historical Clarification Commission in, 77,
377, 378
Mayan resurgence in, 86
Guerrilla Army of the Poor (EGP) (Guatemala),
77
Guevara, Ché, 402
Guinea-Bissau
Portuguese imperialism in, 48
war in, 48
Gulag (Soviet Union), 124, 127, 128–29, 130,
132–33, 135, 177, 351, 399
Gulf War (1991), 121
Gun control, and genocide, 391
Gurr, Ted, 307, 309–10
Gypsies – see Roma
Habibie, B.J., 209
INDEX
418
Habré, Hissène, 378
Habyarimana, Agathe, 236
Habyarimana, Juvénal, 236, 238
Hague Conventions, 363
Haiti, slave rebellion in, 29
Halabji, chemical attack against (Iraq), 120
Halliday, Denis, 26
Halo, Thea, 106, 117 (n. 27), 360 (n. 29)
Hamitic hypothesis, 235, 269
Handicapped and infirm, as victims of genocide,
172–74
Haradinaj, Ranush, 223, 366
Hard vs. soft law, 19
Harff, Barbara, 18, 307, 309–10
Hastert, J. Dennis, 115
“Hate radio,” see Radio-Télévision Libre des Mille
Collines
Hayner, Priscilla, 379
Heidenrich, John, 389, 397
Heizer, Oscar, 264
Henderson, Errol, 314–16
Heng Samrin, 201
Herero, as victims of German genocide
(Namibia), 80–81
Herman, Edward S., 210 (n. 1)
High Commissioner for Human Rights (UN), 86
Hilberg, Raul, 158, 160
Himmler, Heinrich, 170, 178
Hinton, Alexander Laban, xxii, 289, 296
Hirohito (emperor), 365
Hiroshima, atomic bombing of (Japan), 25, 56
Hispaniola
genocide in, 70–71
see also Haiti
Historical Clarification Commission (Guatemala),
77, 377, 378
Hitchens, Christopher, 82
Hitler, Adolf, 52–53, 101, 102, 147, 149, 157,
159, 169, 170, 173, 174, 177, 279, 376
and humiliation, 269
as malignant narcissist, 262
see also Nazis
Ho Chi Minh, 186
“Ho Chi Minh Trail,” 188
Hochschild, Adam, 42–44
“Holocaust of neglect” (Shue), 28
Holmes, Stephen, 11
Holsti, Kal, 28, 390
Homer, 326
Homosexuals, as victims of genocide/gendercide,
170–71, 331–32
“Honor” killings, 331
Horowitz, Donald, 293–94
Horowitz, Irving Louis, 14, 16, 18
Horta, José Ramos, 208
Hotel Mille Collines (Rwanda), 278
Hou Youn, 188
Howard, John, 79
Human Rights Watch, 223, 330, 395, 399
Humanitarian intervention, 392–33
role of regional actors in, 395–96
ulterior motives in, 396, 406 (n. 27)
see also Bangladesh, Cambodia, East Timor,
Kosovo, Uganda
Humiliation
and subaltern genocide, 269–70
as factor in genocide, 103, 261, 268–70
in Armenian genocide, 103, 268–69, 285 (n.
49)
in Nazi holocaust, 269, 285 (n. 50)
in Rwandan genocide, 269
Hun Sen, 201, 370
Hungary
Jewish Holocaust in, 154, 179, 276
Nazi occupation of, 154
Soviet invasion of, 315
Hussein, Saddam, 25–26
and genocide against Iraqi Kurds, 119–22, 313
and invasion of Kuwait, 313
Huttenbach, Henry, 17
Hutu Power, 30, 56, 237, 238, 239, 244
and malignant narcissism, 262
ideology of, 291
Hutus
as perpetrators of genocide in Rwanda, 232,
243
as refugees and génocidaires in Congo, 244,
250–52, 255, 256 (n. 12)
differentiated from Tutsis, 234–35
reprisal massacres of, 244
see also Hutu Power; Rwanda
Ieng Sary, 186, 191, 193
Ieng (Khieu) Thirith, 186, 188
Ignatieff, Michael, 23–24
“Imagined communities,” see Anderson, Benedict
Imperialism
and anthropology, 297
and genocide, 39–48, 94
Aztec, 71, 84
Belgian, 42–44
British, 40–42, 72–73
Chinese, 94–100
defined, 39
INDEX
419
French, 46, 186
German, 80–81, 234
see also Jewish Holocaust; Nazis; Second
World War
imperial dissolution, 48
imperial famines, 41–42
Inca, 71
Japanese, 44–45
Mongol, 5, 47, 101
Ottoman, see Armenian genocide; Turkey
Roman, 5, 50, 193
Russian, 128–29, 141
Soviet, 47–48, 315
Spanish, 70–72
US, 46–47, 72–74
Zulu, 7–8
see also Colonialism
Inca empire, 71
India
conflict with Pakistan, 58, 229–30
famine in, 41
female infanticide in, 331
intervention in Bangladesh, 230, 395, 406
(n. 27)
partition of, 227, 292
religious violence in, 400
under British rule, 41
see also Delhi massacre
Indigenous peoples, 376
and discourse of extinction, 68–69
and disease, 73, 83
appropriation of culture of, 82
celebration of genocide against, 81–82
definition of, 67–68
genocides against, 28–29, 40–41, 67–100, 315,
401
in Australia, 78–80
in Guatemala, 77
in Namibia, 80–81
in US and Canada, 72–76, 94 (n. 89)
in Spanish America, 70–72
redress and restitution strategies for, 380–81
revival of, 85–87
war among, 84–85, 93 (n. 77)
Indonesia
and genocide in East Timor, 206–11
Infanticide, female, 325
as gendercidal institution, 331
in China, 331
in India, 331
Ingushi, as victims of Soviet genocide, 134
Intent, genocidal, 20–22, 353
constructive intent, 21–22
specific intent, 21–22
Intentionalism, see Jewish Holocaust
Interahamwe militia (Rwanda), 238, 241, 246
International Association of Genocide Scholars
(IAGS), xxi, 163
and recognition of Armenian genocide, 114
International citizens’ tribunals, 375–76
on accusations against Leon Trotsky, 376
on “comfort women,” 376
on Iraq, 26, 36 (n. 67)
on Reichstag Fire, 376
on Vietnam, 376
International Commission of Jurists (ICJ), 97
International Committee of the Red Cross
(ICRC), 399
founding of, 363
in Jewish Holocaust, 276
in Rwandan genocide, 247 (n. 6)
International Court of Justice (ICJ), 373
International Criminal Court (ICC), 21, 30, 122,
319, 363, 373–75, 373
Rome Statute of, 21, 30, 363, 373
International Criminal Tribunal for the Former
Yugoslavia (ICTY), 223, 328, 363,
366–68, 380, 383 (n. 15), 395
International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda
(ICTR), 21, 245, 328, 363, 366–68, 380
International Monetary Fund (IMF), 28
International Peace Army (Charny), 396–97
International relations
defined, 307
perspectives on genocide, see Political science
International Rescue Committee (IRC), 250
International War Crimes Tribunal, 46, 376
“Invade the Hague Act,” see American
Servicemembers Protection Act
Iran-Iraq war, 119
Iraq
and genocide against Iraqi Kurds, 119–23, 313
as country at risk of genocide, 310
humanitarian intervention in, 392
invasion of Kuwait, 25, 313
UN sanctions against, 25–26
US support for, 122–23 (n. 3)
Ireland, famine in, 41, 69, 84
Irving, David, 352, 355, 357
Israel, 316
and Jewish Holocaust, 161–62
Izetbegovic, Alija, 219–20
Jacobsen, Maria, 107, 108
INDEX
420
James, CLR, 29
Janjaweed militia (Darfur), 254, 256 (n. 15)
Japan
anti-Japanese racism, 25
as “organic” nation-state, 292
chemical and biological experiments of, 45, 365
conceptions of racial superiority, 45
denial of genocide in Second World War, 360
(n. 23)
exploitation of “comfort women,” 45
genocide and war crimes by, 44–45, 364–66
imperialism in East and Southeast Asia, 44–45
see also Bombing
Japanese-Americans, redress for, 381
Jasenovac death camp (Yugoslavia), 212
Jehovah’s Witnesses
under Nazism, 171–72
Jemal Pasha, 105, 113
Jewish Holocaust, 14, 30, 69, 128, 133, 147–68
alleged uniqueness of, 19, 162–63
and Armenian genocide, 101, 174, 323 (n. 36)
and comparative genocide studies, 14, 157,
163
and Israel, 161–62
and modernity, 289–91
compared with Rwandan genocide, 162–63,
290–91
Danish resistance to, 160, 275–76
death camps in, 152–54
denial of, 352–54
functionalist critique of, 157–58, 265
gas chambers in, 152–53, 318
Einsatzgruppen killings in, 120, 152, 270–71
in Hungary, 154, 159, 276
in Poland, 152–53, 161, 276–77
in Soviet Union, 152–53
in Yugoslavia, 212
intentionalist critique of, 157–58
modernity of, 290–91
“myth” of Jewish passivity in, 158–59
redress and restitution strategies for, 81, 379,
380
rescuers in, 275–81
role of churches in, 148, 159
role of Jewish kapos in, 353
role of Judenräte in, 158
role of Reserve Police Battalion 101 in, 161
see also Anti-semitism; Hitler, Adolf; Nazis;
Second World War
Jews
as “middleman minority,” 295
European persecution of, 148
genocide against, see Jewish Holocaust
ghettoization of, 151–52
“Judeobolshevism,” 169, 174, 267
pogroms against, 9, 363
see also Anti-semitism; Jewish Holocaust
Jews for the Preservation of Firearm Ownership
(JPFO), 391
Jonassohn, Kurt, xxii, 14, 15, 17, 288
Jones, Alfred George, 51
Jovanovic, Arso, 175
Judenräte, 158
Jus cogens offenses, 362
Justice, and genocide, 362–87
Kabgayi death camp (Rwanda), 242
Kabila, Joseph, 254
Kabila, Laurent Désiré, 250–51
Kadyrov, Akhmad, 144
Kagame, Paul, 248 (n. 22)
Kalashnikov (AK-47 rifle), 311, 313
Kaldor, Mary, 395
Kalmyks, as victims of Soviet genocide, 134
Kampuchea Krom, 186, 191
Kangura newspaper (Rwanda), 237, 335
Karachai, as victims of Soviet genocide, 134
Karadzic, Radovan, 223
Karama massacre (Rwanda), 239
Karmal, Babrak, 47
Karski, Jan, 399
Kashmir, gendercide in, 327
Katyn massacre (Poland), 131
Katz, Lili, 277
Katz, Steven T., 18, 22, 162
Keegstra, Jim, 355, 357
Kelley, Douglas, 270
Kemal, Mustafa, 112, 113, 119
Kerensky, Alexander, 125
Kersten, Felix, 170
KGB (secret police), 126
Khan, Genghis, 5, 47, 101
Khan, Yahya, 229
Khieu Samphan, 186, 188
Khmer Krom, 191
Khmer Rouge
and “enemies of the people,” 190
and genocide in Cambodia, 188–202
and urbicide, 192–93
as “lethal regime,” 309
genocide against Buddhists and ethnic
minorities, 199–200
ideology of, 190–92, 401
militarism as defining feature of, 192
INDEX
421
peasantism, anti-urbanism, and primitivism of,
191–92
regional and temporal variations of rule,
195–96
trials of, 200–02
xenophobia and nationalism of, 190–91
see also Cambodia; Communism; Pol Pot
Khrushchev, Nikita, 135
Kierkegaard, Søren, xix
Kiernan, Ben, 5, 194–95, 199
Kirchner, Nelson, 346
Kirov, Sergei, 129
Klemperer, Victor, 150–51
Klinghoffer, Arthur, 376
Klinghoffer, Judith, 376
Kniefall (kneeling apology), 380
Kolyma region (Soviet Union), 128, 132–33
Kopf, David, 25
Kosovo
1999 war in, 29, 372
aftermath of genocide in, 223–24
as disputed genocide, 357
debate over death toll in, 226 (n. 35)
denial of genocide in, 352
gendercide against Albanian men in, 221–22,
327
genocide in, 212, 219, 220–22, 366
humanitarian intervention in, 392, 395, 396,
403
persecution of Roma in, 223
persecution of Serbs in, 223–24, 354
Yugoslav policy towards, 213
Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), 221
Kosovo Verification Commission, 221
Kostunica, Vojislav, 223
Krajina region (Croatia), 213, 214, 215
Croatian conquest of, 220
Krasner, Stephen, 316
Kristallnacht, 150, 169
Krstic, Radislav, 223, 328, 368
Ku Klux Klan, 355
Kuhn, Thomas, 319
Kulaks, 127, 128, 137
Kuper, Leo, xxii, 14, 16
Kuperman, Alan, 396, 403
Kurdish Democratic Party, 119
Kurdistan, see Kurds
Kurds
as participants in Armenian genocide, 108
as victims of genocide in Iraq, 119–23
as victims of persecution in Turkey, 115
Kursk, battle of, 133
Law for Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased
Progeny, 173, 177
Lawyers Against the War, 372
League of Nations, 85, 318
Lebanese, as “middleman minority,” 295
Leipzig
Reichstag Fire trial in, 376
tribunals in, 364, 369
Lemkin, Raphael, xxii, 14, 364
and concept of genocide, 8–12
as norm entrepreneur, 317–19
Lenin, Vladimir, 125–26, 190
Levi, Primo, 151
Leopold (king), 42–44
Lichtenberg, Bernard, 278
Lifton, Robert Jay, 261, 263–64, 355–56
Lindner, Evelin, 268
Lipstadt, Deborah, 355
Lithuanians, as victims of Soviet genocide, 131
Lloyd George, David, 113
Lon Nol, 189, 190, 191, 196
Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) (Uganda), 386
(n. 81)
Louis XVI (king), 6
Loung Ung, 194, 196–97
Luiseno Indians (California), 70
Luther, Martin, 148
MacArthur, Douglas, 25
Madley, Benjamin, 80–81
Maherero, Samuel, 80
Mahoney, Michael, 8
Majdanek death camp (Poland), 153, 155–56,
279
Malaysia
affirmative action in, 391
as successful multiethnic state, 292
Malignant narcissism, see Narcissism
Malinowski, Bronislaw, 297
Malvinas war, see Falklands/Malvinas war
Mandelstam, Nadezhda, 124, 130, 408 (n. 53)
Mann, Michael, 315
Manz, Beatriz, xxii
Mao Zedong, 55, 95, 97, 124, 190, 191, 199
as malignant narcissist, 262
Maoris, see New Zealand
Markusen, Eric, 25, 355–56
Marr, Wilhelm, 148
Marriage Health Law, 173
Mass media, and genocide, 390–91, 398–99
Maternal mortality, 27
Mauritius, as successful multiethnic state, 292
INDEX
422
Mayan Indians
genocide against, 77, 378
see also Caste War of Yucatán; Guatemala
Mead, Margaret, 297
Médecins Sans Frontières, see Doctors Without
Borders
Meghrouni, Virginia (Vergeen), 109–11
Meja massacre (Kosovo), 221–22
Melos, destruction of, 326
Melson, Robert, 14
Memoria Abierta, 346–47
Memorial, see Russian Memorial Society
Memory, and genocide, 345–51
Memorycide (Grmek), 351
Men
and militarism, 326
as genocidal targets “as such,” 338 (n. 11)
as perpetrators of genocide, 332–33
as “provocative targets” (Horowitz), 326
demographic disparities of, 328
gender-selective killing of, see Gendercide
genocidal propaganda against, 334–36
Menchú, Rigoberta, 77
Mengele, Joseph, 81
Mengistu Haile Mariam, 372
Menshevik Party, 125
Mercenaries, 294, 311
and genocide prevention/intervention, 397
Meskhetians, as victims of Soviet genocide, 134
“Middleman minorities” (Chua), 294–96, 304
(n. 32), 492
Midnight Oil (rock group), 92 (n. 55)
Miedryrzec ghetto (Poland), 155
Milgram, Stanley, see Milgram experiments
Milgram experiments, 271–74
Millet system, 103
Military conscription
as gendercidal institution, 331
as mechanism of killing in Armenian genocide,
106
Milosevic, Slobodan, 213, 215, 220, 221, 266
extradition and trial of, 223, 366, 372
Mitterrand, François, 357
“Mixed tribunals,” 369
Mladic, Ratko, 218, 223
Mobutu Sese Seko, 44, 250
Modernity
and genocide, 289–91
defined, 302–03 (n. 5)
Mogadishu, battle of (Somalia), 238
Mongol Empire, 5, 47, 51, 334
Moore Jr., Barrington, 400
Morgenthau, Henry, xx, 102, 105, 106, 108–09
Moreno Ocampo, Luis, 373–74
Morgenthau Plan, 364
Mostar, bridge at (Bosnia-Herzegovina), 225
(n. 7)
Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo (Argentina), 346
Moynier, Gustav, 373
Mozambique
Portuguese imperialism in, 48
reconciliation process in, 379
war in, 48
Muggeridge, Malcolm, 398
Mujahedin (Afghanistan), 47
Mujibur Rahman, 228
Mukakanimba, Gloriose, 240–42
“Multilateral moment” (Power), 318
Museum of Memory (Argentina), 346–48
Nadelmann, Ethan, 319–20
Nagasaki, atomic bombing of (Japan), 25, 56–57
Nama, genocide against (Namibia), 80
Namibia
genocide in, 37–38 (n. 83), 80–81
German imperialism in, 80–81
links to Nazi genocide, 81
redress and restitution processes in, 81, 381
Nanjing massacre (China), see Rape of Nanjing
Narcissism
as factor in genocide, 261, 262–64
collective pathological narcissism, 262–63, 282
(n. 9), 354
in Australia, 354
in China, 263
in Germany, 263
in Great Britain, 263
in Soviet Union, 263
in Turkey, 354
in United States, 263–64, 354
malignant narcissism, 262
“narcissism of minor differences” (Freud), 262
Narcissus, see Narcissism
National Commission on Disappeared People
(CONADEP) (Argentina), 346
National Liberation Front (NLF) (Vietnam), 188
NATO, see North Atlantic Treaty Organization
Navajo Indians (US), 75
Naval Mechanics School (Argentina), 346
as “museum of memory,” 346–48
Nazi-Soviet Pact, 131–32, 345
Nazis, 30, 85, 212, 317, 345, 364, 379, 401
and “asocials,” 150, 169–70, 178
and collective pathological narcissism, 263
INDEX
423
and genocide against Armenians, 101
and genocide against handicapped/infirm,
172–74
and genocide against indigenous peoples, 69
and genocide against Jews, 53, 58, 147–68,
157, 160, 169, 264, 284 (n. 37), 334
and genocide against Slavs, 53–54, 174–75,
284 (n. 39), 334
and genocide in Namibia, 81
and homosexual men, 170–71
and humiliation, 269
and Jehovah’s Witnesses, 171–72
and occupation of Denmark, 275–76
and occupation of Hungary, 154
and occupation of Poland, 174–75, 399
and political opponents, 151, 169
and religious dissidents, 171–72
as “lethal regime,” 309
death camps, 152–54
Enabling Act, 149
euthanasia campaign of, 152
Kristallnacht, 150
Law for Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased
Progeny, 173, 177
Marriage Health Law, 173
Nazi Order Police, 159
Nuremberg Laws, 149
other victims of, 151, 168–84
see also Anti-semitism; Hitler, Adolf; Jewish
Holocaust
Ndiaye, Bacre Waly, 237
New Economic Policy (Soviet Union), 126, 130
New Zealand
Maori population of, 380
restitution processes in, 380–81
Niazi, A.A.K., 227
Nicaragua
case against US at International Court of
Justice, 373
Sandinista revolution in, 403
Nicholas II (tsar), 125
Niederhagen concentration camp (Germany), 172
Nigeria, intervention in Sierra Leone, 396
see also Biafra
NKVD secret police (Soviet Union), 126, 128,
132, 133, 134
Non-Aligned Movement, 187
Nora, Pierre, 345
Norms
as foundation of prohibition regimes, 316–20
defined, 316
norm cascades, 319
norm entrepreneurs, 317–19, 407 (n. 44)
norm grafting, 318
Norodom (king), 186
North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO),
114, 115, 222, 366
intervention in Bosnia-Herzegovina, 222, 223
intervention in Kosovo, 221, 372, 403, 406
(n. 27)
North Korea
as nuclear power, 58
famine in, 41
NSDAP, see Nazis
Nuclear weapons, 25, 56–58, 290, 319
Nullum crimen sine lege, 364
Nunavut (Canada), 381
Nunca Más report (Argentina), 301, 346
Nuremberg laws, see Nazis
Nuremberg tribunal, 330, 364–66
Nyabarongo river (Rwanda), 236, 298
Nyiramasuhuko, Pauline, 333
Obote, Milton, 406 (n. 27)
Oil-for-Food Program (Iraq), 26
Old Testament, 4
Oliner, Samuel and Pearl, 279–81
Omarska concentration camp (Bosnia-
Herzegovina), 215
Omnicide, 56, 58, 290
Opdyke, Irene Gut, 400
Open Memory, see Memoria Abierta
Operation Searchlight (Bangladesh), 229
Operation Storm (Croatia), 220, 222
aftermath of, 223
Organization for Security and Cooperation in
Europe (OSCE), 222
Organization of American States (OAS), 405–06
(n. 15)
Oric, Naser, 218, 225–26 (n. 18)
Orwell, George, xix, 346
Ottoman empire, see Turkey
Pakistan
and conflict with India, 58, 229–30
and genocide in East Pakistan (Bangladesh),
227–31
see also Bangladesh
Pal, Rahadbinod, 364
Palestine, conflict in, 30, 292
Palestinians, 162, 316, 362
see also Sabra-Shatila massacre
Paramilitaries, 107, 219, 221, 252, 254, 294, 311,
353
INDEX
424
Paris Peace Accords, 190
Patriarchy, 333
Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), 121
Peacekeeping and peacebuilding, 394–95
in Central America, 394
People’s Liberation Army (PLA) (China), 95
People’s tribunals – see International citizens’
tribunals
Peloponnesian War, 5
Pequot War (US), 73
Perez de Cuellar, Javier, 220
Peronist Party (Argentina), 347
Peru, genocide legislation in, 369
see also Inca empire
Phillip, Arthur, 78
Picard, Edmond, 42
Pinochet, Augusto, legal proceedings against,
371–72
Piracy, as prohibition regime, 318, 319, 324
(n. 43)
Pius XII (pope), 159
Plant, Richard, 171
Plaszow concentration camp (Poland), 156
Plenty Chiefs, Ruby, 402
Pogroms, see Jews
Poland
genocide in, 131, 133, 174–75
Jewish Holocaust in, 152–53, 161, 276–77
Nazi occupation of, 174–75, 399
Pol Pot, 186, 188, 190, 191, 192
Political science
defined, 307
perspectives on genocide, 307–24
Politicide, 309, 321–22 (n. 7)
Porrajmos (Devouring), see Roma
Porter, Jack Nusan, 16
Potosí (Bolivia), 71, 72
Poverty, as factor in genocide, 310
Powell, Colin, 254
Power, Samantha, xxi, 161
“Power principle” (Rummel), 309
Principled-issue networks, 317
Prisoners-of-war, see Soviet prisoners-of-war
Prohibition regimes, 313, 316–20
defined, 316–17
Propaganda, see Mass media
Proprio motu, 373
Protocols of the Elders of Zion, 165 (n. 8)
Psychology, perspectives on genocide, xxiii,
261–87
psychological projection, 267
Punjab, gendercide in, 327
Putin, Vladimir, 144
Quets, Gail, 17
Racak massacre (Kosovo), 221
Racism, and science/modernity, 289, 297, 303
(n. 8)
Radcliffe-Brown, A.R., 297
Radical Civic Union (UCR) (Argentina), 346
Radio-Télévision Libre des Mille Collines
(RTLM) (Rwanda), 237
Rambouillet conference (France), 221
Rape, 325, 328
and AIDS, 246, 330
and mutilation, 330, 332
and sexual servitude, 329
genocidal rape, 329–30, 332, 367–68
of German women in Second World War, 54,
330
of men, 332, 340 (n. 31)
of women in Bangladesh, 230, 330
of women in Bosnia-Herzegovina, 215–16,
329–30
of women in Darfur, 254
of women in Rwanda, 242, 246, 330
rape-murder, 329–30
see also “Comfort women”; Gendercide; Rape of
Nanjing
Rape of Nanjing, 44, 329
Ravensbrück concentration camp (Germany),
172
Reagan, Ronald, 77, 91 (n. 43)
Red Cross, see International Committee of the
Red Cross
Redress, strategies of, 379–81
Regimes, see Prohibition regimes
Reich, Wilhelm, 261
Reichstag Fire (Germany), 376
Religion, and genocide, 4, 159–60, 185, 191,
273, 278, 279, 280, 400
Reparations, 379–81
by Germany for Jewish Holocaust, 162, 379
Rescuers
of Armenians, 278
of Jews, 160, 275–81
psychology of, 273–74, 275–81
Reserve Police Battalion 101 (Poland), 160,
270
see also Browning, Christopher; Goldhagen,
Daniel
Residential schools
in Australia, 79
INDEX
425
in Canada and US, 75–76
“Residential school syndrome” (Canada), 76
Responsibility to Protect (report), 392, 393, 394
Restitution, strategies of, 379–81
Restorative justice, 371
Revolution
and genocide, 55–56, 310
nuclear revolution, 56–58
social revolution, 55–56
see also Bolshevik revolution; China; France;
Great Britain; Soviet Union; United States;
Young Turks
Revolutionary Front of Independent East Timor,
see Fretilin
Revolutionary United Front (RUF) (Sierra
Leone), 370
Ridenhour, Ron, 274, 286 (n. 73)
Robins, Nicholas, 29, 85
Roma
as victims of persecution in Kosovo, 222, 223
contemporary discrimination against, 179
Nazi genocide against, 53, 177–79
Roosevelt, Franklin, 392
Roosevelt, Theodore, 73
Root-and-branch genocide, 326–29
Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples
(Canada), 381
“Rubber terror,” see Congo
Rugova, Ibrahim 220
Rummel, R.J., 14, 307–09, 314–15
Rumsfeld, Donald, 372–73
Rusesabagina, Paul, 278–79
Russell, Bertrand, 180
Russell Tribunal, see International War Crimes
Tribunal
Russia
and genocide in Chechnya, 141–46
civil war in, 125–26
Russian empire, 128–29, 141
Russian Memorial Society, 399
Russian revolution, see Bolshevik revolution
Rwabugiri, Mwami Kigeri, 234
Rwanda
aftermath of genocide in, 245–46
and intervention in Congo, 252
and intervention in Darfur, 257 (n. 28)
as country at risk of genocide, 310
compared with Jewish Holocaust, 162–63, 232,
290–91
denial of genocide in, 353, 357
economic crisis in, 237
gacaca process in, 245, 370–71, 377, 380
gender dimension of genocide in, 329, 327,
330, 333
genocide in, xx–xxi, 162–63, 232–50, 264–65,
269, 399, 402–03
history of, 234–35
independence of, 236
institution of identity cards in, 236
modernity of genocide in, 290–91
national trials in, 366, 368, 369, 370
regional impact of genocide in, 252, 389
role of church in, 239, 400
Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF/FPR), 236,
237, 242, 243, 244, 245, 248 (n. 22),
335
Sabra-Shatila massacre (Lebanon), 162
Sachs, Jeffrey, 28
Sachsenhausen concentration camp (Germany),
171
Saint-Domingue – see Haiti
Saloth Sar, see Pol Pot
Sanader, Ivo, 223
Sanctions, economic, 393–94, 406 (n. 18)
against Iraq, 26, 393
Sand Creek massacre (US), 73
Sanford, Victoria, 296
Sarajevo, siege of (Bosnia-Herzegovina), 193,
215, 225 (n. 6)
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 47
Sati (widow-burning), 331
Schell, Jonathan, 407 (n. 44)
Scheper-Hughes, Nancy, xxii, 289, 299
Scherrer, Christian, xx–xxi
Schwartzbart, Ignacy, 399
Second World War, 24–25, 85, 147, 264
and “barbarization of warfare,” 53–54
and East Timor, 206
and genocide in the Soviet Union, 131–35
Japanese genocide in, 44–45
and “multilateral moment” following, 318
see also Bombing, aerial; Germans; Jewish
Holocaust; Nazis; Nuclear war; Soviet
prisoners-of-war; War
Sen, Amartya, 41
September 11 attacks, 144, 264
as a contested case of genocide, 26–27
attempted justifications of, 30
Serbia
“Greater Serbia,” vision of, 215
Nazi occupation of, 212
Serbia and Montenegro, see Serbia
Serbs
INDEX
426
as victims of atrocities in Kosovo, 29, 222,
223–24
as victims of genocide, 29, 212, 213, 225 (n. 3),
354
declaration of independence from Bosnia, 215
declaration of independence from Croatia, 215
in Bosnia-Herzegovina, 215
see also Krajina region; Operation Storm
Shaka Zulu, 7
Shakir, Behaeddin, 105
Shiva, Vandana, 27
Show trials (Soviet Union), 130
Shue, Henry, 37 (n. 78)
Sihanouk (prince), 186, 187, 188, 189, 193, 201
Sierra Leone
humanitarian intervention in, 396
“mixed tribunal” in, see Special Court for Sierra
Leone
Slavery, 318
abolition of, 363, 400
as genocide, 23–24
as prohibition regime, 319, 408 (n. 50)
Atlantic slavery, 23–24, 35 (n. 54), 36 (n. 59),
71, 381
restitution claims for, 379–80
Slavs, as victims of genocide, 169, 174–75
Slovenia
independence of, 214
war in, 214
Smith, Anthony, 291, 293
Smith, Roger, 355–56
Snow, Clyde, 300–01
Sobibor death camp (Poland), 153, 173
uprising in, 158
Social revolution, see Revolution
Socialists
as victims of Nazis, 169
Sociology
distinguished from anthropology, 288
perspectives on genocide, 288–96, 302–05
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, 135, 400
Somalia, 322 (n. 13)
as country at risk of genocide, 310
intervention in, 238
see also Mogadishu, battle of
Somme, battle of the, 51
Son Sen, 186
Sonderkommandos (special units), 267
“Sorry Day” (Australia), 79–80, 381
South Africa
revolutionary movement in, 403
truth commission in, 377
Soviet prisoners-of-war
as victims of Nazi genocide, 175–77
link to Jewish Holocaust, 177
Soviet Union
and agricultural collectivization in, 127–28,
189, 401
and collective pathological narcissism, 263
and German prisoners-of-war, 179–80
as leading factor in Nazi defeat, 175, 183
(n. 39)
as “lethal regime,” 309
atrocities against German civilians, 54
empire in Europe, 47
genocide against national minorities, 134–45
imperialism in Afghanistan, 47–48
industrialization in, 127–28
invasion of Hungary, 315
invasion of Lithuania, 131–32
invasion of Poland, 131
show trials in, 130, 376
system of terror established in, 126
“terror entrepreneurialism” in, 265
under Joseph Stalin, 124–41
under Vladimir Lenin, 125–26
see also Bolshevik Party; Communism; Gulag
Spanish National Audience, 22
Special Court for Sierra Leone, 363, 370
Special Organization (Turkey), see Committee of
Union and Progress
Speke, John Hanning, 235
Spengler, Oswald, 11
Spielberg, Steven, 276
Srebrenica massacre (Bosnia-Herzegovina), 216,
217, 218–19, 220, 300, 327, 328, 366,
392
Sri Lanka, 315, 316, 327
Stalin, Joseph, 47, 53, 96, 124–41, 190, 364, 402
and campaign against Jews, 135
and campaign against kulaks, 127
and deportation of national minorities, 134–35,
141, 351
and genocide, 135–37
and rewriting of history, 345–46
as malignant narcissist, 262
collectivization and industrialization measures
by, 127–28, 189, 401
purges of Communist Party, 129–31, 199
upbringing, 126
Stalingrad, battle of (Soviet Union), 133, 180,
193
Stalinism, see Stalin, Joseph
Stambolic, Ivan, 213
INDEX
427
State Failure Task Force, 309, 321 (n. 6)
Staub, Ervin, xxii, 261
Sting, 407 (n. 44)
Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 407 (n. 44)
Straw, Jack, 372
Structural-adjustment policies (SAPs), 28, 401
Structural violence, 40
and genocide, 27–28, 393
Subaltern genocide, 29–30, 85
and humiliation, 269–70
Sudan, genocide in, 252–57
Sudan Liberation Army (SLA), 253
Sugihara, Chiune, 276
Suharto (president), 209
Super Great Leap Forward (Cambodia), 192
Switzerland
and communal cleavages, 390
redress for Jewish Holocaust, 379, 380
T-4, see Euthanasia
Ta Mok, 199
Talat Pasha, 105, 106, 113
Tanzania, intervention in Uganda, 395, 406
(n. 27)
Tasmania, genocide in, 78–79
Tatars, see Crimean Tatars
Taylor, Christopher, 289, 298
Taylor, Telford, 25
Tehlirian, Soghomon, 113
Tenochtitlán (Mexico City), 84
Terrorism, definition of, 36–37 (n. 72)
see also September 11 attacks
Thais, as victims of Cambodian genocide, 200
Thatcher, Margaret, 371, 372
see also Falklands/Malvinas war
Theresienstadt ghetto/concentration camp
(Czechoslovakia), 156
Thompson, JLP, 17
Thucydides, 326
Tibet
accusations of forcible sterilization in, 99
(n. 20)
Chinese occupation of, 95
destruction of culture in, 96–97
forced labor in, 96
genocide in, 94–100
government in exile, 96, 98
“Outer” vs. “Inner,” 94, 99 (n. 2)
uprising in, 96
Timorese Democratic Union (UDT), 207
Tito, Josip, 213
Tokyo tribunal, 330, 364–66
Topzawa concentration camp (Iraq), 120
Torture Convention (UN), 319
Torture survivors, trauma of, 378
Totten, Samuel, xxii, 15
“Trail of Tears” (US), 75
Treaty of Lausanne, 113
Treaty of Sèvres, 112, 119
Treblinka death camp (Poland), 153, 155, 173,
369
Trials, see Genocide and war-crimes tribunals
Tribunals, see Genocide and war-crimes tribunals
Trollope, Anthony, 79
Trotsky, Leon, 126, 139 (n. 11), 376
Truth and reconciliation processes, 377–79
Truth commissions, see Truth and reconciliation
processes
Tu quoque defense, 362, 364
Tudjman, Franjo, 213, 220, 223, 266
Tuol Sleng detention center/genocide memorial
(Cambodia), 199–200
Turkey
and alliance with US, 114
and Armenian genocide, 101–19, 319
and genocide against Assyrians, 106
and genocide against Greeks, 106
as “lethal regime,” 309
denial of Armenian genocide, 113–15, 352–54,
381
Ottoman empire, 103–04, 116 (n. 7), 141,
212, 268
persecution of Kurds, 115
see also Dardanelles campaign; Young Turks
Turreau, Louis Marie, 6
Tutsis
differentiated from Hutus, 234–35
early massacres of, 236
as victims of genocide, 232–50
pre-genocidal pogroms against, 237
Twain, Mark, 68–69
Uganda
as refuge for Rwandan Tutsis, 236
atrocities in, 386 (n. 81)
exploitation of Congo, 252
Tanzanian intervention in, 395, 406 (n. 27)
traditional justice mechanisms in, 386 (n. 81)
Ukraine
famine in, 124, 127–28, 136–37, 398
nationalism in, 128, 134
see also Babi Yar massacre
Unit 731 (Japan/Manchuria), 45, 365
United Kingdom, see Great Britain
INDEX
428
United Nations, 12–14, 317–18, 362
and genocide prevention/intervention, 394–95,
396
and International Peace Army, 397
and Srebrenica massacre, 392
and World Conference against Racism, 379
in Bosnia-Herzegovina, 218, 220
in Cambodia, 201, 370
in East Timor, 209
United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda
(UNAMIR), 232–33, 237, 238, 333, 397
United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF),
394
United Nations General Assembly, 318
United Nations Mission in the Democratic
Republic of Congo (MONUC), 255
United Nations Security Council, 366, 373,
394
and Bosnian genocide, 223
and Kosovo crisis, 395
and Rwandan genocide, 233, 239, 244, 246
United Nations Transitional Authority in
Cambodia (UNTAC), 201
World Food Program (WFP), 394
see also Convention on the Prevention and
Punishment of the Crime of Genocide;
Economic and Social Council; High
Commissioner for Human Rights;
International Criminal Court; Torture
Convention; Universal Declaration of
Human Rights; Whitaker, Benjamin
United States
and collective pathological narcissism, 263–64
and genocide against Filipinos, 264, 322 (n. 18)
and genocide against indigenous peoples,
72–76, 264
and genocide in Guatemala, 77, 91 (n. 43)
and genocide in Rwanda, 233
and September 11 attacks, 26–27
as “melting pot,” 293
imperialism in Indochina, 46–47, 264, 322
(n. 18)
revolution in, 55, 291
Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UN),
297
Universal jurisdiction, 362, 365, 373
Unrestricted submarine warfare, 364
Upper Peru, see Bolivia
Urbicide
as historical phenomenon, 192–93
in Cambodia, 192–93, 195
Urka, 132
Ustashe, see Croatia
Uwimiliyana, Agathe, 238
Vaknin, Sam, 263
Van, uprising in (Turkey), 105
van den Berghe, Pierre, 288
van der Lubbe, Marinus, 376
Vendée, uprising in (France), 6–7
Vernichtungsbefehl (Annihilation Order), 80
Versailles Treaty, 149, 269, 364
Vickery, Michael, 194–96
Videla, Rafael, 346, 378
Vietnam
as disputed genocide, 46–47, 357, 376
relations with/intervention in Cambodia, 186,
188, 191, 199, 396, 403, 406 (n. 27)
US imperialism in, 46–47, 322 (n. 18)
Vietnamese, as victims of Cambodian genocide,
199–200
Vigilante violence, 299
against homosexual men and transgendered,
332
Violence specialists, 293
de Voltaire, Franççois-Marie Arouet, 356
von Epp, Ritter, 81
von Trotha, Lothar, 80
Vukovar siege and massacre (Croatia), 215, 300
Wallace, Alfred Russel, 69
Wallenberg, Raoul, 154, 276–77
Waller, James, xxii, 261, 293
War
and genocide, 48–58
“degenerate war” (Martin Shaw), 48
in Afghanistan, 47–48
in Indochina, 46–47
“new war,” 252, 311–14
prohibition regime against, 400–01
ritualization of, 322 (n. 11)
see also Bombing, aerial; Cold War;
Falklands/Malvinas war; First World War;
Gulf War; Iran-Iraq war; Nuclear weapons;
Second World War; War of the Triple
Alliance
War communism, 126
War of the Triple Alliance, xix
War Refugee Board, 276
Warlords/warlordism, 252
Warsaw ghetto (Poland), 155, 399
uprising in, 158
Webb, Sidney and Beatrice, 398
Weber, Max, 265, 290
INDEX
429
Wehrmacht, 152
Weimar Republic (Germany), 149
Weller, John B., 75
West Pakistan, see Pakistan
Westphalian state system, 317
Wheeler, Nicholas, 406 (n. 23)
Whitaker, Benjamin, 22, 35 (n. 52), 325
Whitaker report, see Whitaker, Benjamin
White Sea Canal (Soviet Union), 128
Wieczorek-Zeul, Heidemarie, 81, 381
Wilhelm II (Kaiser), 80
Wilhelm Gustloff (ship), 179
Wilson, Woodrow, 112, 119
Windschuttle, Keith, 353
Witch-hunts, xix, 336
Women
as victims of genocide, 7, 329–31
as perpetrators of genocide, 333–34, 340
(n. 36)
genocidal propaganda against, 334–36
see also “Comfort women”; Gendercide; Rape;
Root-and-branch genocide
World Bank, 28
World citizenship, 401
World Conference against Racism, 379
World Jewish Congress, 379, 399
“Worthy” and “unworthy” victims, 30, 38 (n. 88)
Wounded Knee Massacre (US), 74
Würth, Adolf, 297
Yad Vashem museum (Israel), 279
Yalta Conference, 180
Yanomami, 311
Yeltsin, Boris, 141–44
Young Turks, 296, 401
and humiliation, 268
coup by, 104
trials of leaders of, 112
see also Armenian genocide
Yucatán (Mexico), see Caste War of Yucatán
Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA), 214, 221
Yugoslav Socialist Party, 213
Yugoslavia
historical origins of, 212
genocide during Second World War,
212–13
genocide in contemporary era, 29, 212–27
see also Bosnia-Herzegovina; Croatia; Kosovo
Yuki Indians (US), 73–74
Zaire, see Congo
Zapatista Rebellion (Mexico), 86
Zenawi, Meles, 368
Ziegler, Jean, 27
Zimbardo, Philip, see Zimbardo experiments
Zimbardo experiments, 274–75
Zionist movement, 161
Zulu Empire, 7–8
Zündel, Ernst, 361 (n. 32)
INDEX
430
